OpenAI discontinues the Sora app and web product

OpenAI discontinued the Sora app and web product, cutting off access to the standalone short-video generation tool it had launched with heavy promotion the previous autumn. Users could no longer generate new videos or reach their existing library through the app or website; OpenAI had urged users in the preceding weeks to export any content they wanted to keep. The company said the Sora API, used by developers integrating video generation into other products, would continue running until a separate shutdown date in September 2026.

OpenAI framed the closure as a reallocation of computing resources toward coding tools and enterprise products rather than as an admission of failure, and said Sora would continue in a narrower form as a research project on world models. The company had announced its intention to wind the consumer product down about a month earlier, after Sora’s short-form feed drew sustained criticism from advocacy groups, family estates and the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA over AI-generated depictions of real people, including Michael Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr, and after OpenAI had already restricted the creation of some public figures’ likenesses in response.

Commercially, the product had struggled to find a business model to match its cultural reach: reported in-app purchase revenue over its entire life was small relative to its daily operating cost, which was dominated by the computing expense of video generation. The shutdown left OpenAI’s consumer product line concentrated on ChatGPT and its coding tools, and marked one of the more visible product cancellations by a frontier AI lab after a launch that had briefly topped app-store charts.