Updated September 10, 2026. This article consolidates our two earlier Sora reports and corrects their shutdown timeline and unsupported financial claims.
Sora’s closure has two separate dates. OpenAI discontinued the web and app experiences on April 26, 2026; its API is scheduled to close on September 24, 2026. That distinction matters if you made videos through the consumer service or built software around the API.
Save your work
OpenAI currently directs users to Sora’s export page: choose Export and wait for the email confirming that the download is ready. The company recommends exporting promptly. It says associated data will eventually be deleted after the applicable export period; do not treat the sunset page as a permanent archive. See its discontinuation notice for the current instructions.
If your own application depends on Sora’s API, review that dependency before September 24. Our practical recommendation is to list affected features, retain the assets you need, and give users clear notice of any interruption. A working consumer export is not a migration plan for an application.
What the Disney announcement actually said
In December 2025, OpenAI and Disney announced a proposed three-year licensing arrangement involving more than 200 characters and a planned $1 billion Disney equity investment. The announcement excluded performers’ likenesses and voices and explicitly made the transaction subject to definitive agreements, approvals and closing conditions. That announcement establishes what was planned; by itself, it does not establish that the investment closed, that money changed hands, or the present status of every part of the relationship. Read the original announcement and its conditions.
What we have corrected
Our earlier coverage presented reported running costs, revenue figures and details of private meetings with too much certainty. We have removed those assertions because this review did not establish them from reliable primary evidence. We have also removed speculation about an internal project code name and claims that the shutdown proves a particular competitor’s business model has won.
One earlier comparison divided an annualised cost estimate by a purported lifetime revenue figure. Those periods do not match, so the resulting “cost per dollar earned” was not a sound measure even before checking the inputs. Product closure alone cannot tell us the complete balance sheet or identify a single cause.
A useful lesson for creators
For a creator, the immediate question is whether the work remains usable outside the tool that produced it. Keep local copies of important exports, record the permissions relevant to a project, and separate an editable project from a finished video. Before moving an established workflow elsewhere, test a small real task and check that the output can be exported in a form you can keep using.
That is our practical reading of the closure, rather than a claim about which AI video company will survive. The confirmed dates and the export instructions are enough to justify taking care of existing work now.
