The Videos API and every Sora 2 model are removed on 2026-09-24, which is twelve days away. What OpenAI has documented is the removal itself: the date, the affected model names, and an empty recommended-replacement column. What it has not documented, anywhere we can find, is what happens to content you have already generated. Several guides currently state that all Sora data is permanently deleted after the cutoff with no recovery window. We could not verify that against OpenAI's own documentation, and we are not going to repeat it as fact. The practical conclusion is the same either way, and it is stronger for being honest about the gap: export anything you care about before the 24th, because nobody has published a commitment that it will still be there.
What is actually documented
From OpenAI's deprecations page, read 2026-09-12:
- Developers were notified on 2026-03-24
- The Videos API and
sora-2,sora-2-pro,sora-2-2025-10-06,sora-2-2025-12-08andsora-2-pro-2025-10-06are removed from the API on 2026-09-24 - The recommended-replacement column is empty
That page says nothing about stored content, nothing about export deadlines, and nothing about what the endpoints return afterwards.
What is being claimed, and what we could not confirm
Widely repeated right now: that endpoints return 410 Gone after the cutoff, and that OpenAI permanently deletes all Sora account data with no recovery window.
Both may well be true. Neither appears in OpenAI's deprecation documentation, and we could not find a first-party statement of either. We are flagging that rather than tidying it away, because "your files will be deleted on the 24th" is exactly the kind of confident, sourceless claim that spreads through a news cycle and turns out to have come from one blog post.
If you need certainty about your own account, ask OpenAI support directly rather than trusting any summary, including this one.
What to do in the next twelve days
Download the outputs you care about. Whatever the retention policy turns out to be, a local copy is the only version nobody can change the terms on. This is the whole action item.
Save the prompts too. For generated work, the prompt and any reference inputs are the source file: without them the output cannot be reproduced on another model. Teams that export videos and discard prompts lose the ability to recreate anything.
Note the settings. Model, duration, resolution, aspect ratio. Six months from now, matching an old asset on a different model needs them.
If you have a product calling the API, the migration is a separate and more urgent job: Sora 2 API shuts down September 24 has the per-use-case replacement table, and note that the endpoints have already disappeared from at least one aggregator's catalog, so provider-routed access can end before the official date.
App and API are different things
This article is about the developer API, which is what the deprecations page covers and dates to 2026-09-24. The consumer Sora app's status is a separate question, and for that we would point you at OpenAI's own product pages rather than at a date repeated in coverage, including dates repeated by us in the past. We got a Sora timeline wrong once by trusting secondary sources, which is a large part of why this article is written the way it is.
The general lesson worth taking
The uncomfortable part of this shutdown is not that a model retired. It is that six months of notice still left people asking basic questions about their own content twelve days out, because the retention answer was never published.
Before you adopt the next tool, the question worth asking is not what it can generate but what you get out and how. See how to protect creative work when a tool shuts down.
FAQ
Will my Sora videos be deleted on September 24? OpenAI's deprecation documentation does not say. Some third-party guides claim permanent deletion; we could not verify it first-party. Export before the date and the question stops mattering.
Can I still download from Sora now? As of writing, yes, and that window closes on the 24th for the API at minimum. Do it now rather than on the 23rd.
Is there an OpenAI replacement model? No. The recommended-replacement column on the deprecations page is empty.
What should I move to? Depends on what you used Sora for. The migration table covers it by use case with real per-clip prices.
Export the outputs, keep the prompts, and treat any confident claim about OpenAI's retention policy, including the reassuring ones, as unverified. The 8frame canvas is free and unlimited, and generation is paid from $19/month.