OpenAI Sora 2

It is being switched off

The Sora app and web experience went dark on 26 April 2026. The API sunsets on 24 September 2026. There is no Sora 3, and OpenAI's own deprecations page names no recommended replacement. If you have anything in production calling it, read our migration guide.

Why it died, and why it matters to you

Not because it was bad. Sora 2 had the strongest physical-world simulation of its generation and handled long clips better than anything else at the time.

It died because of arithmetic. Reported figures put its compute burn at roughly $1 million a day against subscription revenue estimated at under $2 million a month. Video generation is far more expensive to serve than text or images, and the gap did not close fast enough.

That is the part worth carrying forward. The same economics apply to every model you are considering as a replacement. When you pick one, you are also betting that its provider can afford to keep serving it — a question almost nobody includes in a model comparison, and the one that just cost a lot of teams a rewrite.

What to move to

Veo 3.1 for the closest feature parity, Kling 3.0 for the cheapest viable swap, and Runway Gen-4.5 if editing is part of your workflow.