Sora was a text-to-video model and social media app developed by OpenAI. Using artificial intelligence, the model generated short video clips based on prompts, and could also extend existing short videos. In February 2024, OpenAI previewed examples of its output to the public, with the first generation of Sora released publicly for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro users in the United States and Canada in December 2024.
The second generation of Sora was released to select users in the US and Canada at the end of September 2025. Sora 2 integrated social media features into the app. The app was shut down on April 26, 2026, and the application programming interface (API) was discontinued on September 24, 2026, marking the end of the Sora AI brand as a whole.
Background
Several other models capable of generating video from text had been created prior to Sora, including Meta's Make-A-Video, Runway's Gen-2, and Google Veo. OpenAI, the company behind Sora, had released DALL-E 3, the third of its DALL-E text-to-image models, in September 2023. The development of Sora built on OpenAI's prior work in generative AI, including the ChatGPT chatbot and the DALL-E series.
History
Initial release
The team that developed Sora named it after the Japanese word for 'sky' to signify its "limitless creative potential". On February 15, 2024, OpenAI first previewed Sora by releasing multiple clips of high-definition videos that it had created, including an SUV driving down a mountain road, an animation of a "short fluffy monster" next to a candle, two people walking through Tokyo in the snow, and fake historical footage of the California gold rush. OpenAI stated that it was able to generate videos as long as one minute. The company then shared a technical report that highlighted the methods used to train the model. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also posted a series of tweets responding to Twitter users' prompts with Sora-generated videos of the prompts.
As of December 9, 2024, OpenAI had gradually made Sora available to the public for ChatGPT Pro and ChatGPT Plus users in the U.S. and Canada. Prior to this, the company had provided limited access to a small "red team", including experts in misinformation and bias, to perform adversarial testing on the model. The company also shared Sora with a small group of creative professionals, including video makers and artists, to seek feedback on its usefulness in creative fields. In February 2025, OpenAI announced plans to integrate Sora into ChatGPT by letting users generate Sora videos from the chatbot.
Sora 2
Sora 2 was unveiled on September 30, 2025, with an iOS app at the same time, as well as an Android app two months later. All videos generated by the model feature a visible, moving watermark to prevent misuse of the tool. The previous version of Sora also added a safety watermark to allow viewers to distinguish between real and fictional content. On October 7, 404 Media reported that third-party programs that could remove the watermark from Sora 2 videos had become prevalent. Many outlets, such as Wired magazine, have noted that the Sora 2 app is overtly similar to TikTok in style and features.
Discontinuation
On March 24, 2026, OpenAI announced on X that it was discontinuing Sora in both the mobile app and the API. The Sora app was shut down on April 26, 2026, while the API was shut down on September 24, 2026. OpenAI's partnership with Disney, which included a licensing agreement allowing Disney characters to be used within Sora, was also coming to an end. The decision prompted British technology news website The Register to label OpenAI a "product-killer", following in the footsteps of other technology companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services, Broadcom, Cloud Software Group, and Netscape.
OpenAI did not provide a specific reason for discontinuing Sora in its shutdown notice. The reports that emerged regarding this discontinuity linked the decision to computation shortages, cost pressures, and a broader shift toward core enterprise products. Following its public launch, Sora's worldwide users peaked at around a million before declining to fewer than 500,000, while the service cost an estimated $1 million per day to operate due to the computational demands of video generation.
Legal regulation
In November 2024, an API key for Sora access was leaked by a group of testers on Hugging Face who posted a manifesto stating that they were protesting that Sora was used for "art washing". OpenAI revoked all access three hours after the leak was made public and stated that "hundreds of artists" have shaped the development and that "participation is voluntary".
At the time of its launch, Sora 2 allowed copyrighted content by default unless copyright holders contacted OpenAI to restrict the generation of their content on the platform. On October 3, 2025, OpenAI stated that a future update to Sora 2 would give copyright holders "more granular control" over the generation of copyrighted content, but the company did not state whether existing content would be removed. On October 6, the chairman of the MPA criticized OpenAI's approach to copyright with Sora 2.
On December 11, 2025, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, in a three-year licensing deal, to allow users on Disney+ to generate more than 200 of its copyrighted characters on Sora 2. These characters include those from Disney Animation, Pixar, Marvel Studios, and Star Wars.
Capabilities and limitations
The technology behind Sora is an adaptation of the technology behind DALL-E 3. According to OpenAI, Sora is a diffusion transformer, a denoising latent diffusion model with one transformer as its denoiser. A video is generated in latent space by denoising 3D "patches", then transformed to standard space by a video decompressor. Recaptioning is employed to augment training data by using a video-to-text model to create detailed captions for videos.
OpenAI trained the model using publicly available videos as well as copyrighted videos licensed for the purpose, but did not reveal the number or the exact source of the videos. Upon its release, OpenAI acknowledged some of Sora's shortcomings, including its limited capacity to simulate complex physics, to understand causality, and to differentiate left from right. OpenAI also stated that, in adherence to the company's existing safety practices, Sora will restrict text prompts for sexual, violent, hateful, or celebrity imagery, as well as content featuring existing intellectual property.
Sora researcher Tim Brooks stated that the model learned how to create 3D graphics from its dataset alone, while fellow Sora researcher Bill Peebles said that the model automatically learned some aspects of physics from its training data. The model's ability to generate minute-long videos with coherent scenes was considered a significant advancement over prior text-to-video models, which typically produced shorter clips with lower fidelity.
Reception and impact
The February 2024 reveal generated widespread media attention, with many commentators praising the quality and length of the generated videos while also raising concerns about potential misuse, such as deepfakes and copyright infringement. The initial preview clips were shared widely on social media, and the model was seen as a major step forward in generative AI. However, the later discontinuation of Sora led to criticism from users and observers, with some noting the high operational costs and the competitive pressure from other video generation tools.
The integration of Sora into ChatGPT in 2025 was part of OpenAI's broader strategy to embed its AI capabilities into a single platform, but the service's decline in user numbers and the shutdown announcement in 2026 suggested that the product did not achieve sustained commercial success. The decision to discontinue Sora also highlighted the challenges of maintaining resource-intensive AI services in a rapidly evolving market.