OpenAI shuts down Sora video app

OpenAI has shut down Sora, its app for creating videos using artificial intelligence, just seven months after launching a new version with social media features.

The app was closed to the public on 26 April. The company announced in March that it would close the app, and that developer access through its application programming interface would end in September.

What was Sora?

Sora was a text-to-video model that created short video clips from written descriptions. OpenAI first showed examples of its output in February 2024, including a car driving along a mountain road and people walking through a snowy Tokyo. The name comes from the Japanese word for sky.

The first version was released to paying ChatGPT users in the United States and Canada in December 2024. A second version, Sora 2, was released in September last year as a social media app, in which users could create and share AI-generated videos.

Controversy

Sora attracted controversy from the start. By default, it could use copyrighted material in its videos unless the copyright holders opted out, which angered film studios, artists and publishers.

Videos carried a moving watermark to show they were made by AI, but within a week of Sora 2's release, programs appeared that could remove it. There were concerns that the app could be used to create misleading videos of real people and events.

Why close it?

Running video generation models requires very large amounts of computing power, and the closure comes as OpenAI focuses on ChatGPT and its next generation of models.

A competitive field

Other companies, including Google with its Veo models, and several start-ups, offer AI video tools. The technology has improved rapidly, and AI-generated video is increasingly hard to tell apart from real footage.

Concerns about fakes

The spread of realistic AI video has raised concerns about misinformation, fraud and the use of people's likenesses without their consent. Governments, including Britain's, are considering how to respond.

Developers who built services on Sora have until September to move to other tools.