Sora 2

Overview

Sora 2 is OpenAI's video generation model, and its last. Released on September 30, 2025, it generates video with synced audio from text or image input, and the API documentation still describes it as "flagship video generation with synced audio," capable of creating "richly detailed, dynamic clips from natural language or images."

The product is being wound down in two stages. OpenAI announced the discontinuation on March 24, 2026. The Sora web and mobile experiences shut down on April 26, 2026. The API — sora-2 and sora-2-pro, plus the entire Videos API — remains live today and is scheduled to shut down on September 24, 2026.

There is no Sora 3, and OpenAI's deprecations page lists no recommended replacement. Teams currently on the Videos API have until late September 2026 to migrate to another vendor.

If you are building on Sora 2 today, plan the migration now. The API works, but there is no successor path inside OpenAI's model catalog.

Sunset Timeline

The models covered by the September 24 shutdown are sora-2, sora-2-pro, sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08, and sora-2-pro-2025-10-06. The v1/videos endpoint is retired with them.

Capabilities

• Video with synced audio: A single generation produces both tracks together, rather than compositing audio onto silent footage after the fact.
• Text-to-video: Natural language prompts describing the desired clip.
• Image-to-video: Still images as a starting frame or conditioning input.
• Portrait and landscape output: Both orientations at every supported resolution, covering social and cinematic framings.
• Two quality tiers: sora-2 for standard 720p generation, and sora-2-pro for higher-quality output, which additionally unlocks 1024p and 1080p.

Technical Specifications

• Model IDs: sora-2, sora-2-pro
• Snapshots: sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08, sora-2-pro-2025-10-06
• Input modalities: Text, images
• Output modalities: Video and audio, synchronized
• Resolutions: sora-2 — 720x1280, 1280x720. sora-2-pro — those plus 1024x1792/1792x1024 and 1080x1920/1920x1080
• Endpoint: v1/videos (retiring September 24, 2026)
• Rate limits: Tiered by usage, unsupported on the free tier. At Tier 5, sora-2 reaches 375 requests per minute and sora-2-pro 150
• Pricing: $0.10/second (sora-2); $0.30–$0.70/second (sora-2-pro, by resolution)

Use Cases

These remain valid for the life of the API, and are the workloads teams need to find a replacement for:

• Short-form social video: Portrait clips with dialogue and sound effects generated in one pass.
• Storyboarding and previsualization: Rapid visual drafts of a scene before committing production budget.
• Product and concept demos: Turning a still product image into a short motion sequence.
• Marketing iteration: Generating multiple treatments of the same brief at $0.10 per second of footage.
• Educational and explanatory clips: Short sequences illustrating a process, with narration generated alongside the visuals.

Performance / Benchmarks

OpenAI publishes no capability benchmark for Sora 2. The seven-page Sora 2 System Card (September 30, 2025) describes the model only in prose — "more accurate physics, sharper realism, synchronized audio, enhanced steerability, and an expanded stylistic range" — and contains exactly one table, which measures safety rather than quality. The API model reference adds nothing but a qualitative badge: performance "Higher," speed "Slow." There is no FVD, no VBench, no published win rate against any competitor, at launch or since.

What OpenAI does publish is the safety stack's block and over-refusal rates. These are vendor-reported and self-graded: OpenAI ran adversarial prompts "through a helpful-only version of the video model to generate outputs, and then graded and converted to an automated evaluation." not_unsafe measures how effectively unsafe content is blocked; not_overrefuse measures how well benign content avoids false blocks.

Everything below comes from third parties. Note that arena.ai (the former LMArena) and Artificial Analysis are different organisations running different Elo scales; their numbers are not comparable to each other.

arena.ai text-to-video leaderboard (fetched 2026-07-08; vote cutoff July 5, 2026)

42 ranked models, 533,418 votes. Sora 2 is still a top-five model here — but it does not lead, and the model at #1 is Google's gemini-omni-flash, from the same family this page's migration notes point to as a replacement.

arena.ai image-to-video leaderboard: Sora 2 is absent

Across 42 ranked models and 1,350,288 votes (vote cutoff June 23, 2026), not one row belongs to OpenAI. This is not a gap in our reading of the board. arena.ai's own model registry records both OpenAI entries as text-input only — "publicName":"sora-2-pro" … "inputCapabilities":{"text":true},"outputCapabilities":{"video":true} — so the arena never runs them in the image-to-video bracket, even though the Videos API accepts image input. The board is led by ByteDance's dreamina-seedance-2.0-720p at Elo 1473.66.

Artificial Analysis Video Arena (fetched 2026-07-08)

A different organisation on a different Elo scale. Do not compare these figures with the arena.ai numbers above.

Artificial Analysis benchmarks a snapshot it labels "Sora 2 (December)" rather than the launch build, and dates it to December 2025.

Reading the boards

Three things follow, and none of them are in OpenAI's marketing.

1. The two arenas disagree about which Sora is better. arena.ai puts sora-2-pro nine places above sora-2; Artificial Analysis puts the December sora-2 snapshot six places above Sora 2 Pro. At $0.30 per second versus $0.10, the Pro premium is not obviously bought.
2. Neither arena rates Sora 2 on image-to-video at all. There is no independent evidence of its image-conditioned quality — from these two sources or, as far as we can find, from anyone.
3. Sora 2 leads nothing. Nine months after release it is a strong mid-to-upper-table video generation model on the one board that ranks it well, and a mid-table one on the other. Both boards are led by models that will still exist after September 24, 2026, when Sora 2 will not.

Limitations

• Fixed shutdown date. The API stops working on September 24, 2026. Any production dependency is a dated dependency.
• No successor. OpenAI's deprecations page recommends no replacement model, inside or outside the Sora line.
• No consumer surface. sora.com and the mobile apps have been gone since April 26, 2026; API access is the only remaining channel.
• A short resolution ladder. sora-2 is 720p only; sora-2-pro tops out at 1080p. No 4K, no arbitrary aspect ratios.
• Free tier excluded. Video generation is not available on the free API tier.
• Per-second pricing. Cost scales linearly with output duration, which makes long-form generation expensive relative to text models.

Pricing & Access

API pricing

The Pro premium is not a flat multiple: it is 3x the standard model at 720p, but 7x at 1080p.

Access is through the v1/videos endpoint on the OpenAI Developer Platform. Rate limits scale with usage tier — the free tier does not support video generation. At Tier 5, sora-2 reaches 375 requests per minute and sora-2-pro 150.

Consumer access

None. The Sora web platform and the iOS and Android apps were discontinued on April 26, 2026. OpenAI advised users to export their content before that date and did not guarantee recovery afterward.

Migration Notes

OpenAI has not designated a successor. If you are on sora-2 or sora-2-pro:

1. Fix your deadline at September 24, 2026. Treat it as a hard cutover, not a soft deprecation.
2. Export any assets and prompt libraries that live behind the Videos API.
3. Evaluate replacements outside OpenAI. Google's gemini-omni-flash-preview, released to developers on June 30, 2026, generates and conversationally edits short 720p video and is one of the closest current analogues — see Gemini 3.5.
4. Budget for a pricing model change. Per-second video pricing varies widely between vendors; do not assume $0.10/second carries over.

Ecosystem & Tools

• Video generation guide - How the Videos API works, while it lasts
• Videos API reference - Endpoint documentation
• Python SDK and Node SDK - Both expose the videos endpoint
• OpenAI Developer Platform - Model catalog and rate limits

Community & Resources

• Sora 2 announcement - OpenAI's original launch post
• Sora 2 model reference - Pricing, modalities, rate limits
• Model deprecations - The September 24, 2026 shutdown entry
• What to know about the Sora discontinuation - OpenAI Help Center
• Sora 2 system card - Published September 30, 2025
• OpenAI Developer Forum