Sora, the video model from OpenAI, went from a demo that took over the internet to a closed product in a little over two years. (Editorial note: this site is run independently and has no tie to OpenAI; the Sora name is OpenAI's trademark.) The dates are worth laying out, because the shutdown was spread across several announcements and a lot of what circulates about it is vague.

What was shown in 2024

OpenAI announced Sora on February 15, 2024, as a text-to-video model. Coverage such as SD Times summarized the pitch: realistic scenes from text instructions, with multiple characters, varied motion and detailed backgrounds. Access was narrow from the start. Red teamers, meaning domain experts in areas such as misinformation, hateful content and bias, tested the model first, and a group of visual artists, designers and filmmakers gave feedback.

OpenAI also described safeguards that were still in progress: a text classifier to reject policy-violating prompts, image classifiers reviewing generated frames, and a detection classifier for Sora-made video. Provenance metadata was only a plan. In the report's words, "We plan to include C2PA metadata in the future if we deploy the model in an OpenAI product."

No public release date came with the preview. That is why the prompt and sample collection from February 2024 was a record of demos, not of something readers could run.

The timeline after that

Some of this is from OpenAI's own documents and some from press reporting, and the difference matters.

  • September 30, 2025: OpenAI launched Sora 2 as a social iOS app, according to a timeline compiled by Igor's Lab.
  • March 13, 2026: Sora 1 was discontinued in the U.S., per the FAQ quoted in the same timeline.
  • March 24, 2026: press reports said OpenAI was discontinuing Sora as a standalone video product. The reported reasons were a shift toward coding tools, enterprise customers and a broader platform, and a video app that tied up significant computing resources. Those reasons come from the reports, as relayed by Igor's Lab, not from an OpenAI statement.
  • April 26, 2026: the web and app experiences ended, and the API was scheduled to end on September 24, 2026, according to OpenAI's Help Center article on the discontinuation.

The same article describes how to export your work. Content could be exported through an Export button on a dedicated page, with an email when the file was ready. OpenAI said it would permanently delete data tied to Sora after the app closed and any final export window passed, and the page gives no firm date for that.

What to check before building on a hosted video service

The shutdown shows a risk that was easy to ignore in 2024: a hosted model can be withdrawn. Here the API had about six months between the March 24 reports and the September 24 end date, and the app ended on April 26, a month after the reports. Whatever sits on top of a service, such as prompts, scripts, API calls and a library of outputs, has to survive without it.

Before relying on any hosted video tool, find the answers to these:

  • Is there an export function, and does it cover everything you made?
  • Does the provider publish a deprecation schedule, and how far ahead does it warn?
  • Which calls does your code depend on, and could another service be tested against the same list?
  • Are your prompts and settings stored in plain files you control, not only in the web app's history?
  • Is there an open-model route that runs on your own hardware? It is slower to set up, but nobody can switch it off. Check what your graphics card can hold before you commit.

The one thing the shutdown does not settle is whether a polished consumer video app can pay for its own compute. The reporting suggests OpenAI decided it could not, but that is one company's decision, not a law of the field.

One loose end

The sign-up form on the site's old waitlist page cannot lead to a product that no longer exists, and that page says as much.