OpenAI's Sora web shutdown crossed April 26 — API deprecation September 24 closes the consumer-video chapter as multimodal stack consolidates around Veo + Kling + Runway
OpenAI's Sora web and app experience shut down on April 26, with the API scheduled for full deprecation on September 24. The exit from consumer video generation hands the category to Veo 3.1 (Google), Kling v3 (Kuaishou), and Runway Gen-4.5 — and reflects OpenAI's strategic decision to consolidate around Codex and the work-automation surface rather than compete across every multimodal frontier.
The substantive piece is the explicit category exit. OpenAI making the call to discontinue Sora — rather than continue investment alongside Codex and the GPT line — is a strategic clarification. The model's compute economics, content-moderation overhead, and creator-tool product-management surface didn't justify the multi-hundred-million-dollar ongoing investment when ranked against Codex superapp opportunity cost.
The competitive frame is that the multimodal-frontier landscape now has fewer competitive labs but deeper investment per surviving lab. Google's Veo 3.1 + Gemini Omni Flash combination, Kuaishou's Kling family, Alibaba's Happy Horse, Runway's Gen-4.5 — four labs with serious commitment, no longer five. OpenAI's bet on the Codex superapp reads as the consolidation choice on the same week.
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