# OpenAI Is Shutting Down Sora's API on September 24

Sora's web and app experiences were discontinued back in April 2026; the API follows this week, with OpenAI reportedly reallocating the compute to coding, reasoning, and enterprise work. Meanwhile Kling v3 has taken the top spot on the video arena leaderboard.

By Priya Nair (AI Industry Reporter) — published 2026-09-18, updated 2026-09-22
Source: https://aiscoutdaily.com/news/sora-api-shutting-down-september-24

## TL;DR
OpenAI's Sora API shuts down September 24, 2026, the final step in a wind-down that began with the web and app experiences closing on April 26. Sora continues only as internal world-model research, not a public product. In the resulting gap, Kuaishou's Kling v3 now tops the video-generation arena leaderboard at 1,934, ahead of Alibaba's Happy Horse 1.0 (1,816) and ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 Fast (1,747), with Google's Veo 3.1 and Runway's Gen-4.5 remaining the strongest options for prompt adherence and post-generation editing respectively.

Sora's exit has been happening in slow motion. OpenAI discontinued the Sora web and app experiences back on April 26, 2026, and this week the last piece goes with it: the Sora API shuts down on September 24. After that, Sora continues only as internal world-model research inside OpenAI - not a product anyone outside the company can actually use.

## Why it's actually going away

The commonly cited reason is compute reallocation - OpenAI shifting capacity toward coding, reasoning, and enterprise workloads rather than consumer video generation, a category that turned out to be expensive to serve at scale relative to how it monetized. It's a reminder that a model's technical quality and its business case for staying alive are two different questions, and the second one has been deciding a lot of what survives in AI video this year.

## Who's actually winning the category now

With Sora out of the running, the current video arena leaderboard has Kuaishou's Kling v3 on top with a score of 1,934, ahead of Alibaba's Happy Horse 1.0 at 1,816 and ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 Fast at 1,747. Kling 3.0 specifically has moved from being the strongest value-for-money option to genuinely competing at the top, with multi-shot storyboard mode running around $0.10 per second.

Two other names still matter even off the top of the leaderboard. Google's Veo 3.1 remains the safest all-rounder - the strongest prompt adherence, native audio, and 4K output, watermarked with SynthID like the rest of Google's video output. Runway's Gen-4.5 isn't the top generator on raw arena score, but it's attached to Aleph, widely considered the best post-generation editing model in the category, and Runway's API now resells other labs' models too - making Runway as much a video platform as a single model at this point.

## What this means if you were building on Sora

If you have anything in production calling the Sora API, you have until September 24 to migrate. Given where the leaderboard sits right now, Kling v3 is the closest match for raw output quality, Veo 3.1 the closest match if prompt adherence and audio mattered more to your workflow than top-line arena score.

## Sources
- [AI Video Generation in 2026: Veo and Gemini Omni, Kling, Runway, MiniMax H3, and the End of Sora](https://ocdevel.com/mlg/mla-26)
- [Best Text-to-Video AI Generators September 2026: Top 10 Models Ranked](https://www.buildmvpfast.com/articles/best-llms-2026-guide/video-generation-ai)