OpenAI Has Put a Hard Date on Sora’s Consumer Shutdown
OpenAI has moved this from a regional Sora 1 sunset story to a full product shutdown story. According to the company’s updated help documentation, the Sora web and app experiences will be discontinued on April 26, 2026, and the Sora API will be discontinued on September 24, 2026.
That matters because the earlier transition only answered part of the question. We already knew Sora 1 disappeared in the United States on March 13, 2026, with U.S. users pushed into Sora 2. What was less clear was when the broader Sora surface would end, how long exports would remain available, and whether creators should treat this as a cleanup task or an immediate migration.
OpenAI’s latest answer is blunt:
- export your work before April 26, 2026
- do not assume a final export window will definitely exist afterward
- expect any remaining Sora data to be permanently deleted once any limited post-shutdown export period ends
What This Means for Current Sora Users
The operational guidance is now much clearer than it was a week ago.
If you want to keep anything made in Sora, OpenAI says you should:
- Download videos and images directly from your Sora library.
- Use OpenAI’s Privacy Portal if you need the broader account export path.
- Do that before the consumer shutdown date, not after.
The company says it is still determining whether a final export window will exist after the web and app shutdown. That is a real difference from saying an export window definitely will exist. For anyone using Sora as an active archive of experiments, drafts, or client-facing outputs, the safe reading is simple: assume April 26 is the real deadline.
There is also a product split here that matters for AI Photo Labs readers:
- Sora 1 is already gone in the U.S.
- Sora 2 is the only Sora experience that OpenAI is still improving
- Image generation inside Sora 1 is not coming forward as the default still-image workflow
- OpenAI explicitly tells users to keep making images in ChatGPT
Sora 2 Is Still Improving, Even as OpenAI Winds Sora Down
This is not just a death notice. OpenAI is still evolving the surviving Sora 2 workflow while shutting down the broader Sora surface.
In the Sora release notes, OpenAI says it added:
- a built-in editor on web and iOS on March 19, 2026
- clip trimming, stitching, reordering, extension, reprompting, and remixing in one interface
- earlier Sora 2 features such as storyboards, 15-second videos for all users, and 25-second storyboard generations for Pro users on the web
So the product logic is now obvious. OpenAI is concentrating the remaining value into Sora 2 as a video-first editing and iteration tool, while shrinking the older product surface and moving still-image generation into ChatGPT.
Our Take
This is the point where Sora stops being a vague “OpenAI video app” story and becomes a timeline story with real deadlines.
The practical version is:
- export now
- treat April 26, 2026 as the real end for web and app access
- treat September 24, 2026 as the end of the API path
- rebuild any old Sora 1 still-image habits inside ChatGPT instead of waiting for Sora to keep that role
OpenAI is simplifying the product, but that simplification comes at the cost of one more forced workflow split for creators who used Sora as both a video playground and a lightweight image surface.