Is Sora 2 shutting down?
By the Infer teamUpdated
Yes: OpenAI announced Sora 2's shutdown on March 24, 2026, closed the consumer app and web experience on April 26, 2026, and will sunset the sora-2 and sora-2-pro API endpoints on September 24, 2026, per OpenAI's own deprecations page.
No Sora 3 has been announced. OpenAI's discontinuation notice frames this as a closure, not a version bump. Press coverage attributes the decision to compute cost (figures near $1 million a day circulated) and a user decline from roughly 1 million monthly actives down to under 500,000 (apiyi.com). OpenAI hasn't published those numbers itself; treat them as reported, not confirmed.
Two different audiences are affected on two different schedules. Anyone who only used the Sora app or sora.com already lost access on April 26. Anyone with code calling the API (sora-2, sora-2-pro, or the Videos API) still has a working integration today, but it stops on September 24 with no read-only fallback described in OpenAI's notice.
If anything in production still calls sora-2 or sora-2-pro, the clock that matters is September 24. Requests after that date fail outright. Full migration steps (model mapping, prompt rewrites, a pre-cutoff test checklist) live in the Sora 2 alternatives guide.
Six months separate the app closing and the API dying. Most production traffic is sitting in that gap right now.
Infer never hosted Sora 2, so this timeline is reported straight from OpenAI's own notice. The replacement suggestions below cover several labs' models; Infer hosts all of them and earns the same either way.
Related: Seedance 2.0 Pro vs Sora 2, Veo 3.1 vs Sora 2, the Sora 2 alternatives guide, best AI video models in 2026.
Seedance 2.0 Pro is the closest architectural match: joint audio-video generation, the same approach Sora 2 used. Try Seedance 2.0 Pro on Infer →
Frequently asked questions
Is Sora 2 still working right now?
The consumer app and web experience already closed on April 26, 2026. The API — sora-2, sora-2-pro, and the Videos API that serves them — is still live but scheduled to stop on September 24, 2026, per OpenAI's deprecations page.
Why is OpenAI shutting down Sora 2?
Press reporting has attributed it to unsustainable compute cost, cited around $1 million a day, alongside monthly active users declining from a peak near 1 million to under 500,000. Those figures come from coverage, not an OpenAI-published breakdown.
What happens if my app still calls the Sora 2 API after September 24, 2026?
Requests fail. OpenAI's deprecations notice lists sora-2, sora-2-pro, and their dated snapshots as removed on that date, with no grace period or read-only fallback described.
Where do I find Sora 2 migration steps?
Infer's Sora 2 alternatives guide covers model mapping, prompt-structure differences, and a pre-cutoff testing checklist for moving off the Sora 2 API.
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