OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its generative AI video tool, marking the end of one of the most closely watched experiments in AI video. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal cited by SiliconANGLE, co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman told staff in an email that the company will wind down all products built on its video models, including the consumer Sora app and a version for developers. ChatGPT will no longer support video functions either.

The shutdown caps a rapid rise and fall. OpenAI launched Sora in February 2024 to enormous attention, then released the more powerful Sora 2 in September 2025 with features such as “cameos” that let users insert themselves into scenes alongside friends or public figures. The companion app briefly topped Apple’s App Store charts. But most AI-generated clips still were not realistic enough to pass as real footage, and social feeds filled with low-quality synthetic video that critics dubbed “AI slop.”

For creators who built workflows around the tool, the timeline matters. The Sora app and web experience closed on April 26, and on September 24 OpenAI removed the sora-2 and sora-2-pro models from its Videos API. Since September 25, calls to those endpoints return a 410 Gone status, which signals a permanent removal rather than a temporary outage. Any automation or queue still pointed at the API is burning retries on an endpoint that will never answer again.

There is one loose end: Microsoft’s final Sora deployment is scheduled to retire on October 15, 2026, so teams with enterprise integrations should treat migration as this quarter’s work rather than next year’s. The practical replacements depend on the job. Google’s Veo 3.1 covers talking-head clips with native audio, ByteDance’s Seedance handles longer single takes, and Runway’s Gen-4.5 bundles generation with editing, upscaling and an API under one subscription.

The takeaway for creators is to audit now: list every workflow, template and client deliverable that touches Sora, export any reusable assets while remaining access lasts, and re-brief recurring video work onto a supported model. The Sora era showed how fast a platform bet can evaporate, and the creators who fare best will be the ones whose pipelines do not depend on any single vendor.