Google to shut down Veo 3.1 preview models on October 22

Google has listed three Veo 3.1 preview model IDs for shutdown on October 22, 2026, and now points developers at a Gemini Omni model instead. The dates and the replacement come from Google's Gemini deprecations page, which says deprecation announcements are made on the Release notes page.

The page carries three Veo 3.1 preview rows. veo-3.1-generate-preview and veo-3.1-fast-generate-preview both list an October 15, 2025 release date; veo-3.1-lite-generate-preview lists March 31, 2026. Each row gives a shutdown date of October 22, 2026 and the same recommended replacement, gemini-omni-1.1-flash.

Google grades the date as provisional, not fixed. A note above the tables reads: "The shutdown dates listed in the table indicate the earliest possible dates on which a model might be retired. We will communicate the exact shutdown date to users with advance notice to ensure a smooth transition to a replacement model." None of the three preview IDs has been turned off yet, and the earliest date Google lists is six days out.

Veo 3.1 reached public preview on October 15, 2025, and the release notes name what it added: extending Veo-created videos, referencing up to three images to generate a video, and supplying first and last frame images to generate from. Veo 3.1 Lite followed on March 31, 2026, described in the same notes as Google's most cost-efficient video generation model, built for rapid iteration and high-volume applications. The line that needed replacing runs back further: veo-3.0-generate-preview, the model Google's release notes describe as the update that introduced video with audio generation. Google's two pages give different launch dates for that ID, with the release notes dating it to July 17, 2025 and the deprecations page's release-date column saying July 31, 2025.

Google then moved its video story to Gemini Omni. gemini-omni-flash-preview entered public preview on June 30, 2026, generating 3 to 10 second videos at 720p, and gemini-omni-1.1-flash reached general availability on August 27, 2026, per the announcement on the Google blog. Google did not wait for the Veo previews to lapse on their own. The older, non-preview veo-3.0-generate-001, veo-3.0-fast-generate-001 and veo-2.0-generate-001 shut down on June 30, 2026, after a deprecation announcement on June 15, 2026, and those rows send Veo users to the GA models on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

The recommended replacement is a different kind of tool. Google's video documentation calls Gemini Omni Flash a fast, multimodal model for video generation and conversational editing that turns text prompts and images into short videos, and names it the default video model in the API. The Gemini Omni Flash guide spells out the inputs: gemini-omni-1.1-flash takes text, image, audio and video at once, generates video with audio from a text prompt, accepts a reference image for image-to-video work, and can edit or extend an existing video through the Interactions API. Output resolution runs from 360p to 4k, with 1080p and 4k produced by upscaling, and the default aspect ratio is 16:9. The Google blog post says scene extension reads up to 10 seconds of prior context and can chain 10-second extensions to a cumulative 40 seconds.

The same October 22, 2026 date applies to gemini-omni-flash-preview, the June 30, 2026 preview that gemini-omni-1.1-flash replaced. Developers still calling that ID need the same migration.

Veo 3.1 does not disappear as a family. The video documentation still routes developers to Veo 3.1 for scene extension, last-frame control and legacy pipelines, so what the October date retires is the preview IDs in the Gemini API, not the Veo 3.1 family itself. For a creator deciding what to do next, the migration changes the API surface as well as the model ID: the docs call Veo 3.1 through generateContent and Gemini Omni Flash through the Interactions API, so existing Veo calls do not carry over unchanged. The behavior is not identical either: Omni Flash leans on conversational, turn-by-turn editing, while the Veo 3.1 previews were organized around frame control and extension.

The next step is the exact shutdown date, which Google says it will send to users with advance notice ahead of the October 22, 2026 earliest date; migrating off the preview IDs before that notice avoids the scramble.