Last verified

Can ChatGPT make videos?

No.
Sora app discontinued April 2026 · API ends September

No — and the guides saying otherwise are out of date. Video generation lived in Sora, not in ChatGPT, and OpenAI discontinued the Sora web and app experiences on April 26, 2026. The Sora API follows on September 24, 2026. ChatGPT still creates and edits images, reads video you give it in some forms, and talks — but it does not generate video for you.

Sora web and app: discontinued April 26, 2026 Sora API: ends September 24, 2026 Images still work — ChatGPT Images 2.0 on all tiers, including edits Old Sora content is exportable at sora.chatgpt.com/sunset Unused Sora credits can still be spent on Codex
§ 01 / SOURCE

Where this answer comes from.

Methodology →
PER VENDOR DOCS · AUG 21, 2026

OpenAI published a discontinuation notice. The search results have not read it.

The help article is titled "What to know about the Sora discontinuation" and answers its own first question without hedging: the Sora web and app experiences were discontinued on April 26, 2026, and the Sora API will be discontinued on September 24, 2026. That is the whole answer to this question. Video generation was Sora's job; Sora's consumer surfaces are gone and its developer surface has a date on it.

The rest of the notice is housekeeping that matters if you used it: content you created can be exported from sora.chatgpt.com/sunset, and after any final export window OpenAI will permanently delete data associated with your use of Sora. Purchased ChatGPT/Sora credits are not stranded — they can still be spent on Codex.

Scope, stated plainly: we did not run ChatGPT to test this, and we do not hold a ChatGPT account. What we did was read OpenAI's own current documentation — the discontinuation notice, the Images article updated the day before we checked, and the full ChatGPT release notes — and find no video-generation capability documented anywhere in ChatGPT as of 21 August 2026. If OpenAI ships a replacement, this page is wrong the day it launches, which is why it carries a date.

Worth knowing why the search results disagree so loudly: this cluster is ~19,000 searches a month at almost no keyword difficulty, so it attracted a great deal of content — nearly all of it written between 2024 and early 2026, when the answer genuinely was yes. Those pages have not been revisited. Ours will be.

Sora web / app: Ended Apr 26, 2026Sora API: Ends Sep 24, 2026Video gen in ChatGPT: None documentedImage gen in ChatGPT: Yes, all tiersExport window: sora.chatgpt.com/sunsetWe ran the product: No
!
Per vendor docs — we did not run this test. The answer above rests on the source below, read on . Where we run a capability ourselves, this section carries the terminal transcript instead.
Source OpenAI Help Center — What to know about the Sora discontinuation (updated 22 days before we read it) https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001152-what-to-know-about-the-sora-discontinuation
§ 02 / WHY

What ChatGPT does do with moving pictures.

2.1
Images: yes, and more than most people use

The capability people conflate with video is alive and well. ChatGPT Images 2.0 is available on all tiers, generating and editing images from a prompt, from an uploaded picture, or through a selection tool that targets one region of an image. It handles aspect ratios, transparent backgrounds and text inside the image.

Paid tiers add "images with thinking", where the model plans before generating. One retirement to note in passing: the official DALL·E GPT retires on August 30, 2026 — image generation continues through ChatGPT Images, and user-created GPTs with image generation enabled are unaffected.

Details on our image generation page.

2.2
Video as input is a different question

"Can ChatGPT make videos" and "can ChatGPT watch videos" get typed by different people with different problems, and they have different answers. Uploading a clip, summarising a YouTube link, or extracting what happens on screen is an input question, and it is answered separately on our video analysis page.

One adjacent fact worth carrying: OpenAI's newer voice model, GPT-Live-1, explicitly does not support video or screen sharing at launch — those remain with Advanced Voice Mode for eligible subscribers. So even the live-camera capability that once made ChatGPT feel video-aware is currently split across two voice experiences.

2.3
Why this changed at all

We are not going to speculate about OpenAI's reasoning; the notice does not give one. What the record shows is a pattern rather than a one-off. During 2026 OpenAI retired Sora's consumer apps, announced the end of the Sora API, deprecated Atlas (its browser, which stopped working on August 9, 2026), retired group chats, retired the DALL·E GPT, and removed a long list of models from ChatGPT — while consolidating agentic work into ChatGPT Work and Codex.

The practical lesson for anyone building a workflow on a vendor's side feature: the surface you depend on can be withdrawn with a help-centre article and a date. That is not a criticism of OpenAI specifically — it is the shape of this whole market right now, and it is the reason every claim on this site carries the date we checked it.

Frequently asked.

Quick follow-ups people search after this question.

Q · 01 Can ChatGPT create a video from a prompt? +
Not as of 21 August 2026. Prompt-to-video was Sora's function, and OpenAI discontinued the Sora web and app experiences on April 26, 2026. We found no video-generation capability documented in ChatGPT when we checked its current help centre and release notes.
Q · 02 What happened to Sora? +
OpenAI discontinued the web and app experiences on April 26, 2026, and has published September 24, 2026 as the end date for the Sora API. Content created in Sora can be exported at sora.chatgpt.com/sunset, after which associated data is permanently deleted.
Q · 03 Can ChatGPT edit a video I upload? +
No. Editing is available for images — including selecting a region and describing the change — but there is no documented video editing capability. Whether it can usefully read a video you upload is a separate question, covered on our video analysis page.
Q · 04 I paid for Sora credits. Are they lost? +
No. OpenAI states that purchased ChatGPT/Sora credits can still be used for Codex. If you believe you are owed a refund rather than a transfer, that goes through the standard ChatGPT subscription refund process.
Q · 05 Why do so many guides say ChatGPT makes videos? +
Because it was true until this year, and the cluster is large enough at low difficulty to have attracted a lot of content that nobody has revisited. OpenAI's discontinuation notice is dated and public; most of those pages predate it.