Open AI He says he’s killing Sora..
We say goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built a community around it: thank you. What you did with Sora was important and we know this news is disappointing.
We’ll share more soon, including app and API timelines and details about…
– Sora (@soraofficialapp) March 24, 2026
I wrote a week ago that Sora was probably on the chopping block amid OpenAI pivot to business and productivity tools. It seems like they were serious. It will soon disappear. Despite Sora’s ability to generate headlines (when he was first previewed, we at Gizmodo called him “Impressive, but terrifying” ) the company is canceling this compute-intensive AI video experiment.
For my part, on that first day of Sora in February 2024I was driving on Interstate 10 in the Mojave Desert when I first saw tweetsSam Altman about OpenAI’s unreleased video model. The technology I was showcasing felt like such a big, sudden leap in capability that I had to stop and look at my phone.
That was my highlight moment AI Vertigo. I have never felt such a powerful instinctive reaction to a piece of AI technology, and it is doubtful I will again. Partly because something in my brain acclimated and detecting debris became a new survival skill. It also didn’t hurt that some of the first results published by OpenAI were strange, nasty bugs.
Altman revealed that the model was called Sora from the beginning, but then OpenAI let the brand go into hibernation for months and months. Other AI video generators were released to the public in their entiretyand then in September last year, OpenAI, rather confusingly. released Sora 2. But it also gave the Sora brand to OpenAI’s new TikTok-like video-sharing app, which became OpenAI’s consumer hotspot for that once-awesome video model. The main feature of the Sora app was the option to essentially fake yourself and allow others to do so.
The results were so horrendous that I couldn’t look away.
Against our better judgment, many accredited commentators—and also Sincerely—were briefly tied to Soramania. Letting the model have their way with your image was a bit like the feeling of allowing sugar-high kids to color you with markers and glitter, without the sense of human connection and with a much more tangible reputational risk.
But the excitement faded and the social aspects of the app never noticeably became a daily habit for that first wave of users. For a while it was rumored that OpenAI was going to add Sora to ChatGPTbut that never happened. Now Sora is on death row, waiting to be extinguished.
At the time of this publication, it was still possible to view and generate videos with the Sora app. The official Sora Disney now withdrew from its content sharing agreement with OpenAI.
Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI to clarify 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 wiped off the face of the Earth. We will update if OpenAI contacts us.
