Any production workflow calling OpenAI's Videos API or a Sora model alias stopped working on September 24, according to the company's deprecations page. The shutdown notice included no migration path and no replacement on the developer roadmap, leaving teams with active integrations to repoint at third-party video APIs like Runway's Gen-4 Turbo or Kling v2 Pro.

The consumer story behind the shutdown is thin returns on heavy compute: Sora's apps reached about 3.3 million downloads by November 2025 but fell to 1.1 million by February 2026, with roughly $2.1 million in total in-app revenue. A reported $1 billion Disney licensing deal collapsed alongside the shutdown announcement.

Inside OpenAI, Sora survives only as an internal research project focused on world models, not a consumer or developer product. Reporting around the shutdown says OpenAI is redirecting the freed compute toward enterprise coding tools and a ChatGPT super app — video generation simply did not make the cut.