OpenAI Sora

OpenAI Sora — February 2024 – April 2026. In Memoriam.

OpenAI’s video generation model, accessed through the Sora web interface or via their mobile app — and despite some ups and downs, forever an entry in the historical record of AI video.

Sora arrived on February 15, 2024, as a handful of demo clips: Tokyo in the snow, an SUV on a mountain road, a short fluffy monster staring at a candle. For one afternoon, the entire film industry lost its mind. Tyler Perry put an $800 million studio expansion on hold on the strength of a sizzle reel. The name means “sky” in Japanese, chosen to signify limitless creative potential — the kind of detail that reads differently on a memorial page.

The public wouldn’t actually touch it for another ten months. In November 2024, a group of early-access artists leaked access on Hugging Face in protest — “We are not your PR puppets” — and OpenAI shut it down within three hours, a speedrun rehearsal for the main event. On December 9, 2024, Sora finally shipped to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers, a year-old miracle by the time anyone could log in.

Sora 2 landed September 30, 2025, with an iOS app, Cameos, and a TikTok-style feed that The New York Times called “a social network in disguise” and the rest of the internet called SlopTok. I covered the wide release at the time — the headline was the shocking cost, and in hindsight the cost was the whole plot. Copyright was opt-out by default, which went about how you’d expect: Mario and Pikachu everywhere, the Motion Picture Association furious, Studio Ghibli’s representatives sending formal demands, and the estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin asking everyone to please stop. The visible watermark survived roughly a week before removal tools flooded the web. South Park did an episode.

Then the genuinely unexpected third act: on December 11, 2025, Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI to put more than 200 of its characters into Sora. Mickey Mouse was canon for about nineteen weeks.

Behind the feed, the math never worked. Users peaked around a million and slid below half a million, while the service reportedly cost on the order of a million dollars a day in compute. On March 24, 2026, OpenAI announced the discontinuation — no official reason given, though the reporting pointed at compute shortages and a pivot to enterprise. The app and website went dark on April 26, 2026. The API follows on September 24, 2026, taking the Sora brand with it. By the end, the independent leaderboards had Sora 2 Pro ranked below Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0, and Runway — the very field it had stopped in its tracks two years earlier.

Sora is survived by Seedance, Kling, Runway, and several hundred watermark-removal utilities. In lieu of flowers, go make something.