An ending announced without a destination
The Sora discontinuation notice is precise about dates and silent about succession. Two closures are dated, stored material is covered, and no replacement model appears anywhere in it. The register records that as an absence rather than inferring the maker's newer video work as the route. As of 2026-09-22.
| What the page is asked | What Sora publishes | What that leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Is a replacement model named | No replacement is named | Not in the notice and not on the sunset page |
| Is a migration route described | None is described | Export is covered; re-generation is not |
| Does an older version remain | No earlier generation is left reachable | Both surfaces close, five months apart |
| What a reader can act on | The dates and the export window | Which is bookkeeping rather than migration |
Inclusion rule. Read from the vendor's own discontinuation article. A newer model from the same maker does not fill this cell unless the notice names it as the successor. Order. The absence first, then what the notice does provide.
1A date without a destination is half a plan
Five months of warning sounds generous until a team tries to use it. The work that warning is for is testing whatever comes next, and that work cannot start until somebody decides what next is.
So the notice hands its readers the easier half of the problem. Stopping on time is arithmetic; choosing a successor and re-establishing a look on it is the expensive part, and nothing in the announcement reduces it.
2Why the obvious guess is still a guess
Every reader will assume the maker's newer video work is where this goes, and most will be right. Writing that into the register would make the cell look complete while resting on nobody's statement, which is the trade refused across every column here.
The cost of guessing is not abstract. A team that migrated to an assumed successor and found the pricing, the interface or the region coverage different has spent its runway on the wrong test.
3The absence is what the column exists to hold
This register has one retirement with published dates, and that retirement named no successor. That single data point is the whole argument for keeping succession in its own column rather than folding it into the calendar.
A calendar entry answers when. It cannot say that the ending arrived without a destination, and a reader who saw only the date would reasonably assume one existed.
- Named replacement modelNo date announced (as of 2026-09-12)none in the announcement
- Sora API24 September 2026discontinued
- What happens to the workData associated with Sora is deleted after any final export window passes
4Sources
Read from the discontinuation article on help.openai.com, 2026-09-22. The whole entry is on Sora, and the column it sits in is on Named replacement. Same column, other entries: Gemini API, Amazon Bedrock.