OpenAI announced on March 28, 2026 that it will permanently discontinue its Sora video and image generation platform in two stages, beginning with the consumer-facing app on April 26, 2026, and concluding with the developer API on September 24, 2026. The shutdown was reported by Matthias Bastian at The Decoder, citing OpenAI’s official help page.
- Sora‘s web and app version — including sora.chatgpt.com — closes on April 26, 2026; the Sora API closes on September 24, 2026.
- All user data will be permanently deleted once both cutoff dates pass, with no confirmed recovery option.
- OpenAI is reallocating compute toward coding tools and enterprise customers, a direction the company described as aligned with rival Anthropic’s strategy.
- Sora will continue as an internal research project, with OpenAI citing a long-term goal of “automating the physical economy.”
What Happened
OpenAI confirmed on March 28, 2026 that it will shut down Sora, its video and image generation platform, in two distinct stages: the consumer-facing web and app version, including the sora.chatgpt.com platform, will go offline on April 26, 2026, while the developer-facing Sora API will remain active until September 24, 2026. The announcement appears on OpenAI’s help page under the section titled “What to know about the Sora discontinuation.” As of April 2, 2026, users have approximately 24 days to export their content before the first deadline arrives.
Why It Matters
Sora’s discontinuation represents a direct reallocation of OpenAI’s compute resources — pulling back from consumer video and image generation and redirecting capacity toward coding tools and enterprise-oriented services, in a move the company described as mirroring the approach taken by rival Anthropic. Sora launched publicly in late 2024 as OpenAI’s flagship text-to-video and image generation product, available through both a standalone consumer interface at sora.chatgpt.com and a developer API. The platform’s shutdown, arriving less than two years after its public debut, reflects a broader narrowing of focus at frontier AI labs away from dedicated media generation products and toward developer tooling, coding assistants, and enterprise-grade services. Anthropic, OpenAI’s closest competitor at the frontier model level, has similarly concentrated its product investment on professional and developer-facing applications rather than consumer media generation.
Technical Details
The two-phase shutdown gives developers a substantially longer runway than consumers: the Sora API remains active for approximately five months after the consumer app closes on April 26, providing time for developers to migrate or decommission Sora-dependent integrations before the September 24, 2026 final cutoff. The sora.chatgpt.com platform — which processed generation requests for consumer users — is treated separately from the API endpoints used by third-party developers, accounting for the staggered timeline. Users can currently export their videos and images directly from the Sora library before the respective cutoff dates. OpenAI has not confirmed whether a post-deadline export window will be offered; the company stated that if one becomes available, users would receive advance email notification. Once all deadlines pass, all user data will be permanently deleted, with no recovery pathway disclosed in the announcement.
Who’s Affected
Consumer users who stored video and image projects in the Sora library must export their content before April 26, 2026 — approximately 24 days from today — while developers and companies with integrations built on the Sora API have a longer deadline of September 24, 2026 to adjust their pipelines. Both groups face the risk of permanent data loss if they miss their respective cutoff dates, as OpenAI has provided no guarantee that a post-deadline export window will exist. Third-party applications and services that integrated Sora’s generation capabilities through the API will also need to remove or replace those integrations before the September cutoff.
What’s Next
Despite shutting down its consumer and developer-facing products, OpenAI stated that Sora will continue in a reduced capacity as an internal research project centered on “world models” — AI systems designed to simulate and reason about physical environments. OpenAI described the long-term research aim as “automating the physical economy,” though no timeline, research agenda, or publication schedule was included in the announcement. On the product side, OpenAI is working to consolidate ChatGPT and its other tools into a unified “super app,” with the compute capacity freed by Sora’s shutdown being redirected toward coding products and enterprise customer workloads.
