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OpenAI's Sora API shutdown date has passed, closing the last developer access to Sora 2
OpenAI's discontinuation notice set September 24, 2026 as the end of the API, five months after the app went dark, and warns that Sora data will be permanently deleted after any final export window.
The published end date for the Sora API was September 24, 2026, and that date has now passed. OpenAI's discontinuation notice lists two dates and nothing else in between: the Sora web and app experiences were discontinued on April 26, 2026, and the Sora API was set to be discontinued on September 24. For anyone who still had a production integration pointing at a Sora endpoint, the migration question stopped being a planning item and became a live failure.
The notice itself is short. It states the two dates, points users to an export path, and sets out what happens to stored content afterwards. There is no replacement OpenAI video endpoint named in it, and no transition period offered to developers as a matter of policy.
The export page has a second, undefined deadline behind the first one
OpenAI directs users to sora.chatgpt.com/sunset and tells them to click Export, with an email once the archive is ready. The company's wording on what follows is conditional rather than fixed: after Sora is discontinued, and after any final export window passes, it says it will permanently delete data associated with a user's Sora activity. It adds that it will notify users by email before a final export window begins, and qualifies that with "if we are able to offer one." That phrasing does not commit to a grace period at all, which is why the notice also tells people to export as soon as possible. Anyone treating the September 24 date as the only deadline is working from an incomplete reading.
A model retired without a successor in the same product line
The wind-down was announced on March 24, 2026, when an OpenAI spokesperson said the Sora research team would keep focusing on "world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks," and the company said it would share timing details for the app and API later. That is a reallocation of the research effort, not a handoff to a new generation of the product. Sora 2 had launched with OpenAI describing it as what it thought "may be the GPT-3.5 moment for video," and the app reached a million downloads faster than ChatGPT before downloads dropped 45 percent by January, per TechCrunch figures cited at the time of the shutdown announcement. The same wind-down also stranded the Disney character licensing arrangement, which we have covered separately.
Multi-model platforms lose a line item
The shutdown also removes an entry from the aggregator platforms that had been reselling Sora 2 alongside other vendors' models. Higgsfield told readers in its own model comparison that Sora 2 would stay available on its platform until the API window closed on September 24, which is the clearest illustration of how a single vendor deprecation propagates through every subscription that bundled it. Subscribers on those plans now have one fewer model behind the same price, with no announced adjustment attached.
For anyone auditing what is left, the practical check is narrow: whether an exported archive actually downloaded, whether prompts, reference images and source footage were saved outside the platform, and which endpoint the code now calls. The Sora 2 entry is a historical record at this point rather than a buying option.
Sources: OpenAI Help Center, Axios, Higgsfield.
Priya Shenoy: Tracks what AI video actually costs across the platforms that resell access to the same handful of models. Treats a pricing page as a claim, not a fact, until someone checks it.