OpenAI shuts down Sora

OpenAI is shutting down Sora in two steps: the web app and mobile app end on April 26, 2026, and the application programming interface, which is the developer connection for software, ends on September 24, 2026. Users who want to keep old clips have to export them before the app cutoff. (help.openai.com) That is a sharp turn from December 2024, when OpenAI launched Sora as a standalone product at Sora.com for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro subscribers. At launch, OpenAI pitched it as a separate place to generate videos with a dedicated interface, not just a feature buried inside ChatGPT. (openai.com) Sora itself was OpenAI’s text-to-video system, which means a user typed a prompt and the model turned that prompt into moving images. OpenAI said the original model could generate videos up to one minute long. (openai.com) By September 2025, OpenAI was still pushing harder into video, releasing Sora 2 with synchronized dialogue and sound effects. The product page that is still live today markets “Sora 2” as a tool for hyperreal motion and sound, which makes the shutdown look less like a technical failure and more like a business retreat. (openai.com, openai.com) The legal problem arrived from Ohio, where OverDrive sued OpenAI in federal court on November 19, 2025. OverDrive said its own Sora app had been on the market for years and that OpenAI’s use of the same name created confusion in the marketplace. (courtlistener.com, crainscleveland.com) OverDrive is not a tiny app studio that appeared overnight. It is the Garfield Heights, Ohio, company best known for the library app Libby, and Crain’s reported that OverDrive had launched its Sora reading app seven years before filing the lawsuit. (crainscleveland.com, crainscleveland.com) OpenAI’s own help pages show another clue about how messy the product had become. On March 13, 2026, Sora 1 was already sunset in the United States, and U.S. users were pushed into Sora 2 by default, which means the company was still migrating users between versions just weeks before announcing the full discontinuation. (help.openai.com) The release notes also show OpenAI was still trying to make the economics work as late as early 2026. In February, the company added ways for users to buy extra video generations in the Sora app, which is the kind of move companies make when a product is expensive to run and included limits are not enough to cover usage. (help.openai.com) OpenAI has not erased the brand from its main site, but the support notice is blunt about the end of the service. That split tells you the model research may still matter inside OpenAI even as the standalone consumer product disappears. (openai.com, help.openai.com) So the story is not just that one app is going away. A product OpenAI unveiled in December 2024, upgraded in September 2025, and was still monetizing in February 2026 is being wound down by April 2026 while a trademark case stays pending in federal court. (openai.com, openai.com, help.openai.com, courtlistener.com)