On April 26, 2026, Sora goes dark. The consumer app and ChatGPT video generation shut down; the API follows September 24. OpenAI announced the full shutdown on March 24 — six months after launch.
At its peak, Sora 2 was the only non-Google model in the T2V top 5, but the economics were never close to working.
The lesson. The model did not survive either — OpenAI is deprecating the API alongside the consumer app. The field consolidated around Google (Veo 3.1 dominates T2V), xAI (Grok leads I2V and Video Edit), and Kling/Seedance/Runway for specialized tasks. Building a consumer product around a capability that costs hundreds of dollars per clip doesn't work — and unlike other shutdowns, there's no API fallback this time.