OpenAI kills Sora

OpenAI is shutting down Sora’s app and website on April 26, 2026, and the programming interface follows on September 24, 2026. The company says users should export any videos or images they want to keep before the shutdown because permanent deletion comes after the service ends and any final export window closes. (help.openai.com) That is a fast comedown for a product OpenAI introduced at sora.com on December 9, 2024. At launch, Sora let ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro subscribers generate clips up to 1080p and 20 seconds long, remix footage, and post creations into a shared feed. (openai.com) Sora was built like a video camera attached to a chatbot. You typed a scene, uploaded an image or clip if you wanted, and the system returned a short synthetic video in widescreen, vertical, or square format. (openai.com) The app took off anyway. CNBC reported that Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days after its late-September 2025 app launch and briefly climbed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts. (cnbc.com) Then OpenAI changed what it wanted to be. CNBC reported in March that Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, told staff the company was “orienting aggressively” toward high-productivity use cases and enterprise customers instead of side projects that burned money without fitting that plan. (cnbc.com) You can see that shift in the products OpenAI is pushing now. The company’s business pricing page sells ChatGPT Business and ChatGPT Enterprise as workplace tools for drafting, analysis, automation, security, and software shipping, while OpenAI also introduced a dedicated Codex desktop app for coding work in February 2026. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) OpenAI is also collapsing more of its software into one work hub. CNBC reported on March 19 that the company plans to combine the ChatGPT app, its browser project, and the Codex coding app into a single desktop “super app,” which points in the opposite direction from a separate consumer video playground. (cnbc.com) The other problem is that video is expensive in a way text is not. When Sora launched in December 2024, OpenAI said it was still trying to make video generation “affordable for everyone,” which was a quiet warning that every flashy clip was chewing through large amounts of computing power. (openai.com) OpenAI’s shutdown note hints at where some of that spending is going next. The help page says unused ChatGPT or Sora credits can still be used for Codex, which turns a video budget into a coding budget with one sentence. (help.openai.com) So this is not just one app dying. It is OpenAI choosing spreadsheets, codebases, and corporate contracts over a viral video toy that drew attention fast but no longer fit the company it is trying to become in 2026. (cnbc.com)