Sora's API shuts down without its $1B Disney deal

OpenAI's Sora API was discontinued on September 24, 2026, ending the developer path for the company's video model. The three-year Disney agreement, announced separately on December 11, 2025, never closed, according to Reuters reporting summarized by Startup Fortune. OpenAI's help centre confirms the two-stage shutdown: the Sora web and app experiences were discontinued on April 26, 2026, and the API followed on September 24, 2026.

The Disney terms were the licensed-character case the whole category was watching. Under the announced agreement, Sora would have generated short, user-prompted videos using more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters, with Mickey Mouse, Ariel, Iron Man, Darth Vader and Stitch listed in OpenAI's own announcement. Disney also agreed to make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI and receive warrants to buy more equity, and the official announcement stated that the transaction still needed definitive agreements, approvals and closing conditions. Reuters reported that it never closed and no money changed hands, so the exit is not a writedown but a licence that did not become a business.

The timing was reported as abrupt. Reuters reported that Disney and OpenAI teams were working on a Sora-linked project on a Monday evening in March 2026, and that Disney was told about the cancellation about 30 minutes after that meeting; OpenAI announced the shutdown publicly the next day, on March 24, 2026. Reuters also reported that OpenAI was focusing on coding tools and corporate customers, and people with knowledge of the decision said Sora used significant computational resources and left other teams with less capacity.

What users have to do now is mechanical and dated. OpenAI's help centre says content can be exported from sora.chatgpt.com/sunset, that it will email when an export is ready, and that after the shutdown and any final export window it will permanently delete data associated with Sora use. Purchased ChatGPT and Sora credits can still be spent on Codex, per the same page. The help centre recommends exporting as soon as possible.

For creators, the closure removes an access point rather than a capability. Sora's jobs, synced-audio cinematics, multi-shot sequences and image-anchored generation, are covered by other vendors' models, and the migration math is the same one this site laid out on September 20, 2026: pick a replacement API, expect per-second billing and a different duration ceiling, and re-point the integration rather than the workflow.

The next date on this file is procedural rather than corporate: OpenAI has not announced a successor video API, and the export window is the last item it has left open.