OpenAI is shutting down its Sora video generation app. “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the company wrote in a X post published Tuesday afternoon. For now, OpenAI has yet to say when the app and its related API service would become unavailable. Instead, promising to share those details at a later date.
“We’ve decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API. As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Engadget.
While today’s news might come as a surprise for some, there were warning signs Sora was heading in this direction since the start of the year. While Sora hit the top of the US App Store charts shortly after its debut, interest in the platform appears to have quickly fizzled out thereafter. At the start of 2026, data from analytics firm Appfigures suggested the app was seeing successive month-over-month declines in both new installs and user spending. In December alone, a time of year when most apps typically flourish, Sora reportedly saw a 32 percent decline in new downloads from November.
The shutdown also aligns with OpenAI’s recent shift in strategy. Since the release of GPT-5.2, the company’s “code red” response to Google’s Gemini 3 Pro model, OpenAI has tried to court professionals like coders and data analysts with systems that excel in those domains, seeing enterprise customers as a route toward profitability. However, today’s shutdown does appear to come with an additional cost for OpenAI. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney is exiting the deal it signed with the AI lab at the end of last year, and won’t, as a result, invest $1 billion into it.
