The end of Sora: OpenAI will close its application to generate realistic videos with artificial intelligence

The company led by Sam Altman presented Sora as a new social application in September of last year, a platform that allows you to generate videos using the capabilities of the Sora 2 model, share them and remix them with the creations of other users, all in a short vertical video interface similar to TikTok.

At the time of its launch, the application was very well received among users and reached one million downloads in less than five days, even surpassing the adoption of ChatGPT. Sora’s popularity continued to grow in the following months, so much so that OpenAI faced problems meeting the demand for video generation after seeing its service saturated.

However, once its initial success stabilized, Sora began to see a notable decline in its downloads and now, around six months after its launch, OpenAI has decided to close the application permanently.

“We say goodbye to Sora,” the company said in a post on the social network

Although OpenAI has not specified the final closing date, users will soon no longer have access to the application and developers will not be able to continue using the API. Likewise, it is expected that this announcement will also imply the end of the technology company’s plans to integrate Sora’s video generation into ChatGPT.

As an OpenAI spokesperson detailed in statements to Engadget, Sora’s departure from the application and API is due to a restructuring of the objectives of the team in charge of this service.

Specifically, he explained that, as they focus on development and demand for computing increases, the Sora team “continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world physical tasks.”

Another consequence of these changes is that the agreement between OpenAI and Disney has also ended, as The Hollywood Reporter has learned. This agreement included the investment of 858 million euros by Disney and a content license for three years, to allow the use of more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, in the content generated by Sora.

The technology company has not shared the causes of the application’s closure. However, it must be taken into account that Sora competes with other similar video generation applications from the main current AI companies, such as Vibes from Meta, or the Nano Banana model from Google Gemini.

Likewise, OpenAI has also faced some problems related to copyright infringement by Sora, after the dissemination of content very similar to the original of, for example, animes.

Sam Altman also declared a “code red” situation for OpenAI in December 2025 under pressure from its competitors, detailing the need to restructure its efforts to improve ChatGPT, before focusing on other products.