OpenAI shuts Sora down in the API too: as of September 24, video generation is gone

On September 24, 2026, OpenAI removed the Videos API and its Sora 2 video generation models from its API. The official Deprecations page lists what is gone: sora-2, sora-2-pro, sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08, sora-2-pro-2025-10-06, plus the entire Videos API. There was notice: OpenAI writes that it “notified developers using the Videos API and Sora 2 video generation model aliases and snapshots of their deprecation and removal from the API on September 24, 2026”, and that notice dates back to March 24, six months earlier. The line that matters is the one that isn't there: in the replacement model column, for Sora 2, there is nothing. Since that date, OpenAI's API no longer offers video generation.

The shutdown came in two stages, and the gap between them is the interesting part. The app and the web version (sora.chatgpt.com) closed on April 26, 2026; the API kept answering for another five months, until September 24 (OpenAI's help page and The Decoder). On that same help page, OpenAI urged users to download their content before the deadlines. On the official developer forum, back in April, a moderator of the OpenAI Developer Community summed it up in one sentence — “The Sora app and the API are separate surfaces” — and that separation explains why those integrating via the API got a different timeline from those using the app.

As for the surrounding details, it's worth being explicit about what isn't verified. According to The Decoder, once those dates pass the data is permanently deleted, and the company had not yet decided whether to open a final export window — so as things stand, nobody knows whether there will be one. The Decoder also reports that Sora continues as a research line on world models, with the long-term goal of “automating the physical economy”, and attributes the shutdown to a reallocation of compute toward coding tools, enterprise customers and a single desktop app: the available sources contain no official OpenAI statement on the strategic reasons, so that reading remains the outlet's. Two more claims are circulating in the press — an operating cost of around a million dollars a day and the end of a licensing deal with Disney — and I can't find them in a primary source: I'll leave them where they are, with whoever wrote them. Nor is it known whether OpenAI will offer video generation in the API again with a different model.

The practical news isn't an app closing: it's that a production endpoint was pulled with no internal migration path. Anyone who had Sora 2 inside a product now has failing calls and, as things stand, has to look for an alternative outside OpenAI, which points to no internal migration path. Six months' notice is fair as a matter of procedure, and technically the app and the API really are separate surfaces. But for those who integrate, that separation cuts both ways — it gives you five extra months, and then leaves you without the line that usually follows a deprecation, the one that tells you what to use instead.

— Olya