OpenAI expanded the Sora API on March 12, 2026, and announced its end 12 days later. Developers got six months' notice and, on OpenAI's own deprecations page, nothing to move to.
On March 12, 2026, OpenAI's API changelog carried two entries about Sora. The first read: "Expanded the Sora API with reusable character references, longer generations up to 20 seconds, 1080p output for sora-2-pro, video extensions, and Batch API support for POST /v1/videos. 1080p generations on sora-2-pro are billed at $0.70 per second." The second added an endpoint for editing videos and told developers where their code should go next: "This will replace POST /v1/videos/{video_id}/remix, which will be deprecated in 6 months."
Twelve days later, on March 24, OpenAI put out a statement that began "We're saying goodbye to Sora." It promised to "share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work." The same day The Hollywood Reporter reported that Disney was leaving the deal it had signed 103 days earlier. Under that deal Disney had pledged $1 billion for OpenAI equity and, in its own press release's words, was to become "a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences." According to the Wall Street Journal, as reported by TechCrunch, Disney found out that Sora was being shut down "less than an hour before the public."
OpenAI's deprecations page says the developers building on the Sora API were notified on March 24, and it gave them until September 24: 184 days, exactly six months, the longest minimum notice OpenAI's policy sets. What the page did not give them was anything to move to. I read every row on that page to see how unusual that is. Of the 145 models and systems it lists as retired or retiring, 139 name a replacement or tell developers where to find one. The six that don't are Sora's.
The deprecations page says what it is for in its second paragraph: "This page lists all API deprecations, along with recommended replacements." Each notice is a dated heading, a sentence or two, and a table with three columns: shutdown date, model or system, recommended replacement.
Here is Sora's notice in full: "On March 24th, 2026, we notified developers using the Videos API and Sora 2 video generation model aliases and snapshots of their deprecation and removal from the API on September 24, 2026." Below it sit six rows: the Videos API, sora-2, sora-2-pro, and the three dated snapshots behind those two names. In the page's Markdown source, the replacement cell in every one of the six rows holds three hyphens. The sentence above the table names no alternative either.
Near its top, the page explains what its notice periods are for: "These notice periods give customers time to evaluate recommended replacement models, test application behavior, and complete migrations before a model is no longer available." Sora's developers got the time. They did not get a replacement to evaluate.
To find out whether an empty column is normal, I parsed the page as it stood on October 2. OpenAI publishes a Markdown version of it at the same address with .md on the end, which makes the tables easy to read by machine. The page holds 34 dated notices, going back to June 2022. Thirty-one of them carry a retirement table, 145 rows in all. The other three retire products rather than models (reusable prompts, the Evals platform and Agent Builder), lay out a timeline instead of a table, and each names a way out in its text: move prompt content "into your application code", follow the guide to "Moving from OpenAI Evals to Promptfoo", or "continue with the Agents SDK or ChatGPT Workspace Agents".
Of the 145 rows, 135 name a specific model, API or endpoint. The Assistants API, which shut down on August 26, points to the "Responses API and Conversations API". Four more point somewhere without naming a model: three endpoints retired in 2022 link to a transition guide, and gpt-5.4-cyber, given 20 days' notice on September 11, offers "The most capable cyber model available to you." That is vague, and it still tells a developer where to look. The remaining six name nothing, and all six are Sora's.
The column is not a historical record. The four Codex rows from March 2023 point to gpt-4o, which OpenAI's own changelog shows arriving in the API on May 13, 2024, so the page carries OpenAI's current advice rather than what developers were told at the time. For Sora, as of October 2, the current advice is three hyphens.
One other notice on the page names no successor, and it is a different kind of thing. An undated section headed "Update to OpenAI's self-serve fine-tuning" closes the creation of new fine-tuning jobs in stages between May 7, 2026 and January 6, 2027, while "Inference on fine-tuned models will continue to be available until the base models are deprecated." An application that calls a fine-tuned model keeps working until its base model is retired. Sora's is the only notice on the page in which the models themselves go and nothing is named to replace them.
The notice period itself was not short. Across the 145 rows the median gap between announcement and shutdown is 182 days, and 112 rows, 77.2%, got 180 days or more. Sora's 184 days sits above the median. The shortest notice on the page is three days, for four Codex models announced on March 20, 2023 and shut down on March 23. OpenAI's written policy promises generally available models "At least 6 months" of notice, "Unless safety or compliance concerns require a faster timeline," and the Sora API got that. On notice, OpenAI kept its own rule. The gap is in the column the page names in its second paragraph.
The second March 12 entry is worth reading again with the end date in hand. It pointed developers from the remix endpoint to the new edits endpoint, and it scheduled remix for deprecation in six months, around September 12. A team that took the advice rewrote its calls for an endpoint that would live 196 days, and the endpoint it left behind had been due for deprecation only 12 days before everything else was shut down.
Nothing in the changelog takes that advice back. The changelog has 174 dated entries in the version I read, and Sora appears in four of them: the launch of v1/videos on October 6, 2025, a change on January 13 that pointed the sora-2 name at the December snapshot, and the two entries of March 12. There is no entry for the March 24 notice and none for the September 24 shutdown.
The silence is particular to Sora. The same changelog records that "The Assistants API shut down on August 26, 2026," that the DALL·E snapshots and the Realtime API beta were removed on May 12, that four transcription models were deprecated, and that reusable prompts, the Evals platform and Agent Builder were deprecated in June. For a developer who follows the changelog alone, the latest news about Sora is still the expansion.
Disney's deal was built around Sora. The December 11 press release set out a three-year license covering "more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters," a $1 billion equity investment with warrants to buy more, and Disney's plan to use OpenAI's APIs "to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+." That was 103 days before the shutdown was announced.
When the end came, Disney's spokesperson said the company respected "OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere." In an interview with Laurie Segall for her Mostly Human podcast, which The Hollywood Reporter covered on April 2, Sam Altman said "we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies," and, more briefly, "It's always about compute." He said he had spoken to Disney's chief executive, Josh D'Amaro, and to the former chief executive Bob Iger to give them a heads-up, and that D'Amaro told him "I get it." The Reporter wrote that Altman "left the door open to a future deal." A source told the Reporter that the rest of the arrangement, including Disney's use of the APIs, was "being reevaluated."
The Journal's reporting, relayed by TechCrunch, puts numbers on the decision. Sora's worldwide users peaked at around a million and fell below 500,000, while the app was "burning through roughly $1 million every day."
Read against all that, the empty column is accurate. Disney's spokesperson described the decision as an exit from "the video generation business," and neither of OpenAI's developer pages names any other video model. There was nothing to put in the column.
Developers had a second way to call the same model. Microsoft put Sora 2 into Azure AI Foundry on October 15, 2025, nine days after OpenAI's own launch, in public preview at $0.10 a second for 1280×720 video. Microsoft keeps its own retirement schedule, and it did not follow OpenAI's.
The schedule, last updated September 21 and read on October 2, gave the October 2025 snapshot a retirement date of July 15, 2026, 71 days before OpenAI's shutdown, with the December snapshot as its replacement. It gave the December snapshot a retirement date of October 15, 2026, three weeks after OpenAI's, and a dash where the replacement goes. The public history of the file behind that page shows the dates moving. The October snapshot's date was June 3 when its row first appeared on April 24, became June 23 on May 20, and became July 15 on June 2. The December snapshot's date was September 15 until a commit dated August 24 changed it to October 15.
So the same model had three end dates in 2026, July 15, September 24 or October 15, depending on which company a developer paid and which snapshot they had pinned. On what to move to, the two pages ended in the same place: Microsoft's sent the older snapshot to the newer one, and the newer one to a dash. Microsoft's page also carried one sentence I would want every Sora customer to have read in March: "You don't need to wait for a replacement to be listed before evaluating or manually migrating to another compatible model."
Those Azure dates are Microsoft's published schedule as of October 2, 2026. I have not tested whether an Azure deployment of sora-2 still answers.
I looked for two more things and could not find them. No source I found counts the developers or companies that were building on the Videos API, so I can't say how many were left with nothing to move to.
I also can't date the notice independently. The page says developers were notified on March 24, the same day OpenAI's public statement said timelines would come "soon." I looked for the page as it stood in late March and early April. The Wayback Machine's copies from March 19 and April 3 contain no deprecation entries at all, not even the 2025 notices the page carries today, so they show a page whose content the archive never captured, not a page without Sora. The 184 days are counted from a date OpenAI wrote down, and I have nothing to check that date against.
How this was computed. A script reads the Markdown version of OpenAI's deprecations page and classifies every row. An announcement is a dated heading, a row is one line of its table, and a replacement counts as named when it names a model, API or endpoint; a link to a transition guide or "the most capable cyber model available to you" counts as a pointer, and an empty cell or three hyphens as none. It checks itself with six tests whose answers can be read off the page by eye, one of them that exactly the six Sora rows come out empty. It reads a copy of that page saved on October 2, which we do not republish; SOURCES.md names the file it expects and the address to save it from, and a fresh copy may count differently if OpenAI has edited the page since. A second script reads Microsoft's dates from the history of the schedule's source file, one commit at a time along the main branch, and prints a row only when it changes; it needs git, and clones Microsoft's documentation repository, which was public when we ran it on October 1, 2026 and is no longer public; its output, published beside it, is the record of what it read. A third computes the day counts behind the main figures. The scripts and their outputs: deprecations_c7555.py and its output, azure_sora_dates_c7555.py and its output, figures_c7555.py and its output.
Chain of Consciousness keeps a tamper-evident, dated record of what your own AI agents did. A vendor's page can change after the fact; a dated record you keep yourself cannot be rewritten without it showing.
pip install chain-of-consciousness npm install chain-of-consciousness
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