AI.LS is a ChatGPT mirror site. It puts a chat interface in front of models it accesses on your behalf, so you can use them without an OpenAI account. The domain still resolves and the page still loads.
What has not been updated is what it says it offers. The site’s own description advertises gpt-3.5, gpt-4 and Claude. Every one of those is a 2023-era reference, and the first two no longer exist in ChatGPT at all.
What a Mirror Site Actually Is
The name is slightly misleading. A mirror does not copy ChatGPT, it proxies it.
You type a prompt into someone else’s website. That site sends the prompt to OpenAI or Anthropic using an API key it controls, receives the response, and displays it back to you. Your conversation passes through an intermediary you know nothing about.
AI.LS appeared in community-maintained lists of free ChatGPT mirrors, with an entry dated April 2023 on the most widely used of those lists. Dozens of similar sites sat alongside it. Most are gone now.
Why These Sites Made Sense in 2023
Three real problems drove the whole category, and it is worth remembering how genuine they were.
ChatGPT had signup waitlists. It was unavailable in a long list of countries, most significantly mainland China, which is why AI.LS targets Chinese-language keywords in its own metadata alongside English ones. And GPT-4 sat behind a $20 subscription while free users got GPT-3.5.
A site offering GPT-4 access with no account and no card solved something. People used them for reasons that had nothing to do with wanting to cut corners.
Why That Reason Has Mostly Gone
The free tier changed completely.
ChatGPT free and Go accounts now run GPT-5.6 Luna with unlimited text chats. There is no waitlist, no card required, and no model picker because everyone on those tiers gets the same model. The capability gap between free and paid is real but it is nothing like the 2023 gap, where free users were locked out of the flagship entirely.
The retirements matter too. GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o4-mini and the original GPT-5 were all removed from ChatGPT in February 2026. Every active model now belongs to the GPT-5 family or later. A site advertising gpt-4 in 2026 is either describing something it no longer serves, or serving something through an API route most people would not choose knowingly.
Regional blocks are the one original problem that has not disappeared. That is genuinely still a reason people reach for mirrors, and it is worth naming rather than pretending otherwise.
What AI.LS Currently Claims
Reading the site’s own metadata is more informative than reading any review of it.
The description calls it an elegant ChatGPT UI based on gpt-3.5, gpt-4 and Claude, positioned as an alternative to ChatGPT and to Poe, with free usage quotas and no login required. Its keyword list includes GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4.0, Claude API, and the Chinese term for free ChatGPT.
Two structural details stand out. The site’s social preview images are served from gpt99.xyz, a different domain entirely. Its listed Twitter account belongs to a third brand again. None of that is improper, and small operators reuse infrastructure constantly, but it does mean the thing you are handing your prompts to is not a single clearly identified entity.
The main application is JavaScript-rendered, so the page loads before anything appears. Whether the underlying service still functions is not something you can establish from the outside.
The Part Worth Being Careful About
This is a structural point about the category rather than an accusation against any particular site.
When you use a mirror, your prompts sit on infrastructure operated by someone whose identity, jurisdiction and data practices you have not verified. There is no privacy policy you have read, no terms you have agreed to, and no recourse if the conversation logs end up somewhere unexpected.
For asking about a recipe, that is not a meaningful risk. For pasting a contract, a codebase, a client brief or anything with personal information in it, you are handing that material to an unknown third party in exchange for saving a signup you could complete in ninety seconds.
There is also a reliability problem. Mirrors run on someone’s API budget, and when that budget runs out or the key is revoked, the site stops working without warning. That is why most of the sites listed alongside AI.LS in 2023 no longer resolve.
If your actual interest is reaching several models through one interface, that is a legitimate need with legitimate products behind it. Our guide to AI model aggregators and gateways covers why routing through any intermediary changes model versions, pricing, context limits and privacy compared with going direct.
Who Might Still Have a Reason
People in blocked regions. This is the honest case. If official access is unavailable where you are, a proxy is a workaround, and the privacy trade-off is one you are making deliberately rather than accidentally. Do not paste sensitive material through it.
Nobody else, really. If you can create an account, do that. Free ChatGPT in 2026 gives you more than any 2023 mirror did, from a company you can identify, with terms you can read. And if you are paying for a subscription you barely use, the fix is cancelling it and using the free tier, not routing through a stranger’s server.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is AI.LS safe?
There is no public evidence it is malicious. There is also no verifiable privacy policy, identified operator or data-handling commitment. Treat anything you type into it as potentially retained by an unknown party.
Does AI.LS really give free GPT-4?
Its description says so, but GPT-4 was retired from ChatGPT in February 2026. That claim has not been updated in a long time, whatever the service currently routes to behind the scenes.
Is using a ChatGPT mirror against OpenAI’s terms?
Your exposure as an end user is minimal. The terms question sits with whoever operates the proxy and resells or gives away access through their own key. If they lose that key, the site goes down with it.
The Practical Call
AI.LS is a survivor from a moment that ended. In early 2023 it solved waitlists, regional blocks and a paywalled flagship model, and thousands of people used it for exactly those reasons. Two of those three problems are gone.
Unless you are behind a regional block, there is no longer a good argument for typing into an unidentified intermediary when the official free tier is better, faster and accountable to someone. If you are new to all of this and just working out what these models are, our explainer on what GPT actually stands for is a more useful starting point than any mirror site.
Published: September 10, 2026
