Added to our archive on 1 October 2026. This report is dated to the day of the event.

On 24 September 2026 the last part of Sora went dark. OpenAI removed its Videos API and every Sora 2 model from its developer platform, and within a day developers were filing bug reports: calls to the video endpoint now came back with a 404, the error code for a page that does not exist.

The switch off completed a six month wind down that OpenAI announced on 24 March. The consumer app and website closed in April, and API customers had until September. OpenAI named no successor model, so every product built on Sora 2 now has to get its video somewhere else. For people who used the app, anything they did not export is due to be deleted.

  • What: OpenAI removed the Videos API and the sora-2 and sora-2-pro models on 24 September 2026, with no replacement listed.
  • Users: The app closed on 26 April; videos had to be exported, and Sora data is permanently deleted once the deadlines pass.
  • Why it matters: One of the most talked about AI apps of 2025 lasted less than a year, undone by computing costs, falling use and fights over faces and characters.

What was switched off

OpenAI's deprecations page lists the Videos API together with five model names: sora-2, sora-2-pro and the dated snapshots sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08 and sora-2-pro-2025-10-06. "On March 24th, 2026, we notified developers using the Videos API and Sora 2 video generation model aliases and snapshots of their deprecation and removal from the API on September 24, 2026," the company wrote. The page recommends no replacement.

The effect showed up in public code repositories. In an issue opened on 25 September, maintainers of neuro-san-studio, an open source project from Cognizant's AI lab, reported that the /v1/videos endpoint returned 404 errors for both GET and POST requests and said they would remove their OpenAI video tool. A bug report filed on 26 September in the OpenClaw project described the same empty 404 response and noted that its bundled OpenAI provider still offered sora-2 as the default video model.

The app went first

The consumer side had closed months earlier. On 24 March OpenAI posted on X that it was "saying goodbye to the Sora app" and thanked "everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it". It promised timelines for the app and the API and "details on preserving your work".

What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.
OpenAI, post on X, 24 March 2026, as reported by AP

Those details arrived within days. The web and app version would close on 26 April 2026 and the API on 24 September, The Decoder reported from OpenAI's help page. Videos and images could be exported directly from each user's Sora library. OpenAI said it had not yet decided whether to offer a final export window after the cutoff and would email users if it did; once all deadlines passed, user data would be permanently deleted. Image generation inside ChatGPT was not affected, Euronews reported.

Why OpenAI pulled the plug

OpenAI's notice gave no specific reason, and reporting filled the gap. Citing a Wall Street Journal investigation, TechCrunch wrote on 29 March that Sora's worldwide user count had peaked at around one million and dropped below 500,000, while the service cost roughly USD 1 million a day to run. Every clip drew on the same limited stock of AI chips that OpenAI needed for its coding and business products, where Anthropic's Claude Code was winning engineers and companies. NBC News reported that moving that computing away from Sora would free chips for "more lucrative coding, reasoning or text-generation tasks", and that top executives had said the company could not do "everything at once".

The download numbers pointed the same way. The app peaked in November 2025 at about 3,332,200 downloads across the App Store and Google Play and fell to 1,128,700 in February, according to Appfigures data cited by TechCrunch. Appfigures estimated Sora's lifetime revenue from in app purchases at about USD 2.1 million. By our own arithmetic, that is roughly what the service cost to run in two days at the Journal's estimate of USD 1 million a day.

USD 2.1M
Sora's estimated lifetime revenue from in app purchases, Appfigures data reported by TechCrunch on 24 March 2026.

Faces, estates and a Disney deal that ended with the app

Sora 2 launched in September 2025 together with an invite only social app. Its signature feature let people scan their faces and make realistic deepfakes of themselves, then drop themselves and others into almost any scene. OpenAI first called the feature cameos; the company Cameo took OpenAI to court over the name and won, forcing a switch to "characters", TechCrunch reported. Videos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robin Williams drew public objections from their daughters, and clips of Mario, Naruto and Pikachu spread across the app. AP reported that advocacy groups, academics and experts had warned about nonconsensual images and realistic deepfakes made with it.

The closure also ended Disney's bet on the product. In December 2025 Disney agreed to a three year deal that would have let users create videos with more than 200 licensed characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, alongside a planned USD 1 billion Disney investment. NBC News reported that the deal would not go ahead. Disney said in a statement carried by AP that it respects "OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere".

Sora has not vanished from OpenAI entirely. According to The Decoder, the work continues as a research project on world models, AI systems that simulate how the physical world behaves, with the goal of "automating the physical economy". For developers, the deprecations page is the final word: the Sora 2 models are removed, and the replacement field is empty.