R.I.P. Sora (2024-2026)

OpenAI says it’s killing Sora.

We’re saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.

We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on…

— Sora (@soraofficialapp) March 24, 2026

I wrote a week ago that Sora was likely on the chopping block amid OpenAI’s pivot to business and productivity tools. It looks like they were serious. It’s going to be gone soon. Despite Sora’s ability to generate headlines (When it was first previewed, we at Gizmodo called it “Breathtaking, Yet Terrifying”) the company is pulling the plug on this compute-guzzling AI video experiment.

For my part, on that first Sora day in February of 2024, I was driving on Interstate 10 in the Mojave Desert when I first saw Sam Altman’s tweets about OpenAI’s unreleased video model. The technology he was putting on display felt like such a huge and sudden jump in capability that I had to pull over and stare at my phone.

That was my peak moment of AI vertigo. I’ve never felt such a powerful gut reaction to a piece of AI tech, and it’s doubtful I ever will again. In part because something in my brain acclimated, and slop detection became a new survival skill. It also didn’t hurt that some of the very first outputs published by OpenAI were bizarre, off-putting failures.

Altman revealed that the model was called Sora from the very beginning, but then OpenAI let the brand hibernate for months and months. Other AI video generators were fully released to the public, and then in September of last year, OpenAI rather confusingly released Sora 2. But it also granted the Sora brand name to OpenAI’s new TikTok-like video sharing app, which became OpenAI’s consumer-facing access point for that once-jaw-dropping video model. The killer feature in the Sora app was the option to essentially deepfake yourself, and allow others to deepfake you.

The results were so horrendous, I couldn’t look away.

Against our better judgment, many reputable commentators—and also yours truly—were briefly roped into Soramania. Letting the model have its way with your image was a little like the feeling of allowing kids on a sugar high color you with markers and glitter, minus the sensation of human connection, and with much more tangible reputational risk.

But the thrill faded, and the social aspects of the app never noticeably gelled into a daily habit for that first wave of users. It was rumored for a time that OpenAI was going to fold Sora into ChatGPT, but that never happened. Now Sora is on death row, waiting to be snuffed out.

At press time, it was still possible to watch and generate videos with the Sora app. The official Sora X account says OpenAI will “share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.” Disney has already pulled out of its content-sharing agreement with OpenAI.

Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for clarity about what this means for the continued existence of the model itself. While discontinuing the video-sharing app is straightforward, it’s less obvious whether the core model will be folded into another model, preserved in some other way, or deleted from the face of the Earth. We will update if OpenAI gets back to us.