The Sora app and website closed on April 26, 2026, and OpenAI plans to shut the Sora API on September 24, 2026 — the company is folding the product and redirecting the work toward coding, enterprise, and world-model research.
2026-07-04 · by Moe Ameen
OpenAI is discontinuing Sora, the text-to-video product it launched in late 2024 and expanded with the Sora 2 app in 2025. The wind-down runs in two stages. The consumer experience — the sora.com website and the Sora iOS and Android apps — was shut off on April 26, 2026. The Sora API, used by developers who built video generation into their own products, is scheduled to be discontinued on September 24, 2026. OpenAI announced the plan in late March 2026.
OpenAI has framed the move as a strategic reset rather than a retreat from video. The company said it is reallocating resources toward coding tools, enterprise products, and a more consolidated ChatGPT experience, and that the underlying Sora research will continue as a "world models" effort aimed at simulating physical environments rather than shipping a consumer video app. In other words, the brand and the product are ending; the research line lives on inside OpenAI.
OpenAI did not publish a detailed post-mortem, but the reporting around the shutdown points to a familiar set of pressures. Sora was reportedly expensive to run — figures around $1 million a day in compute have circulated — while usage fell well off its launch peak, with active users reported to have dropped from roughly a million toward half that. The product also drew sustained criticism over deepfakes and unauthorized likenesses, and a planned licensing arrangement with Disney reportedly collapsed around the same time. Treat the specific dollar and user figures as secondary-source estimates, not official numbers; the two shutdown dates are the confirmed facts.
For anyone who made content in Sora, the practical detail is data. OpenAI has told users to download their videos before the cutoff dates and has said it has not committed to an export window afterward, after which account data is set to be permanently deleted. If you have work inside Sora, exporting it now is the safe move.
The lesson a Sora user should take from this is about dependency, not just downtime. Sora was a raw video generator — it made clips and stopped there — and when one company changed strategy, everyone who built on it was stranded. Kompozy is deliberately the opposite shape. It is a generation-and-publishing engine that draws on several providers at once (Claude and OpenAI for copy, gpt-image for images, Google Gemini for face-locked avatar images, HeyGen for avatar video, fal.ai for VFX hooks, Pexels for b-roll), so no single model going dark takes your pipeline with it. If your video source disappears, the engine and the workflow around it keep running.
Concretely, two moves this week. First, export whatever you made in Sora before the deletion date, then bring those clips into Kompozy and get more out of them than the app ever let you: caption them in your voice through the Persona Brief, wrap them in brand-exact HyperFrames, reframe them per platform, and fan each one into a carousel, a quote graphic, a blog recap, a newsletter, and native text posts — then schedule and publish the whole set across nine platforms plus blog and email from one queue. Second, replace the net-new generation you were leaning on Sora for: Kompozy generates its own video — HeyGen persona and avatar shorts, Marketing Shorts, Listicle and Naturalistic video, a generative VFX hook, and clipped shorts from footage you already have — none of it tied to a product that can be switched off. And the shutdown itself is a story your audience is searching for right now; drop "OpenAI is shutting down Sora" into Kompozy and it fans one point of view into a blog explainer, a carousel, a captioned short, and platform-native posts while the news is fresh.
In two stages. The Sora consumer app and website (sora.com and the iOS/Android apps) closed on April 26, 2026. The Sora API for developers is scheduled to be discontinued on September 24, 2026. OpenAI announced the plan in late March 2026.
OpenAI has framed it as a strategic reset — redirecting resources toward coding tools, enterprise products, and a more consolidated ChatGPT, while continuing the underlying research as a "world models" effort. Secondary reporting also cites high compute costs, declining usage, deepfake and likeness controversies, and a collapsed Disney licensing deal, but OpenAI has not published official figures.
OpenAI has advised users to download their content before the cutoff dates and has not committed to an export window afterward, after which account data is set to be permanently deleted. If you have work in Sora, export it now rather than counting on a later recovery option.
Other AI video models (ByteDance Seedance, Kuaishou Kling, Alibaba, Runway, Google) remain available, but they are raw generators. To avoid being stranded by another single-vendor shutdown, pair generation with an engine like Kompozy that draws on multiple providers and turns clips into captioned, branded posts published across nine platforms plus blog and email.