OpenAI’s Sora app arrived as the breakout star of AI video, racing up the charts and promising to turn anyone’s text prompts into slick, shareable clips. After that stellar debut, the product is now wrestling with slowing growth, user frustration, and a thicket of safety and copyright headaches. The arc from overnight sensation to plateau is starting to look like a stress test for the entire AI‑video boom, not just one app.
The early surge proved there is real demand for generative video on phones, but the comedown is exposing how hard it is to sustain that excitement once the novelty fades. Usage metrics, creator complaints, and rising competition are converging into a single story: Sora is still influential, yet it no longer feels untouchable.
The rocket‑ship launch that set impossible expectations
From the start, Sora was engineered to look like a hit. The stand‑alone app for the Sora 2 video generator landed on iOS with an invite system that made access feel scarce, then quickly opened the gates as clips flooded social feeds. Earlier coverage noted that Sora hit 1 million downloads faster than ChatGPT, with According to Appfigures data showing how quickly it outpaced earlier AI tools. That early momentum set a benchmark that would be hard for any product to maintain once the initial wave of curiosity passed.
By late 2025, Sora’s mobile presence looked dominant. The app was still iOS‑only, but it sat near the top of the U.S. App Store charts and was framed as OpenAI’s bid to enter the content game in a serious way. Reporting on the Sora 2 rollout described how the stand‑alone app launched on iOS in late September and, Despite the invite requirement, quickly built a base of creators experimenting with AI‑generated shorts. That scorching start is the backdrop for why the current slowdown feels so stark.
From chart‑topper to slowdown: the numbers behind the slump
The clearest sign of trouble is in the download charts. According to new Appfigures data, Sora’s downloads dropped 32% month‑over‑month in December, then fell again in Jan as the initial wave of users peeled off. A Facebook post amplifying the same dataset noted that Sora’s mobile app downloads fell 45% in January, underscoring how quickly the growth curve has flattened. Another breakdown of the Appfigures numbers highlighted that Jan figures reflected a New phase where Sora was no longer adding users at anything like its launch pace.
The revenue picture is softening too. One analysis of Sora’s performance across iOS and Android found that the app has seen 9.6 m downloads in total and $1.4 m in consumer spending to date, with $1.4 million in revenue not enough to match the early hype. A separate report on Sora’s trajectory noted that downloads fell 48 month‑over‑month in December, citing Sarah Perez and Appfigures data that showed how quickly the curve bent downward. Another analysis of the U.S. rankings said the Sora video app suffered a 45% download collapse in January, dropping from No. 1 to 101 on the App Store, a fall that would rattle any consumer app, let alone one positioned as the future of video.
Copyright, safety, and the cost of tightening the reins
Behind the numbers, Sora is also colliding with the messy realities of copyright and safety. At the same time that usage began to cool, OpenAI has struggled with containing copyright infringement in Sora, with one report noting that At the product’s peak, users could easily remix or mimic studio IP in ways that alarmed rights holders. Initially, the company told Hollywood studios it would rely on an opt‑out model, only to face pressure to add more explicit protections and filters. A separate analysis of Sora’s trajectory echoed that copyright concerns have dampened user enthusiasm and noted that, Initially, OpenAI’s approach to studios’ intellectual property was to let them opt out rather than seek prior permission.
Safety problems have been just as thorny. One investigation described how the outlet 404 M reported on a flood of Sora‑made videos of women being strangled, with Media coverage casting this as part of a “consistent and dangerous pattern” of rushing out unsafe products. A podcast episode titled “Open AI’s Sora 2 Was a Big Sloppy Mess” captured the mood of that backlash, with the hosts arguing that Backlash to Sora had reached a tipping point and detailing two major changes OpenAI was forced to make. Each new restriction may have been necessary to address harm, but it also chipped away at the anything‑goes creative playground that drew early adopters in.
Users say the magic is fading
For many creators, the slowdown is not just about charts, it is about how the app feels to use. In one Reddit thread, a user posting as Comprehensive‑Pin667 reacted to the latest download data with a shrug, arguing that this is what happens when a Novelty app loses its shine, while another commenter, Sad‑Plankton3768, lamented that the initial excitement had given way to boredom. Elsewhere, a discussion in r/singularity framed Sora in the context of rivals like Runway and Kling, with one commenter noting that companies such as Runway and Kling focus solely on video models instead of trying to be everything at once.
Quality complaints are also piling up. In r/OpenAI, one creator wrote that they were coming from using Runway for image‑to‑video and were a fan of ChatGPT and Dalle, but found Sora “shockingly unreliable” at handling prompts. That kind of feedback suggests that some of the people most likely to pay for advanced tools are not convinced Sora is the best option. When the power users who drive word‑of‑mouth start drifting to competitors, it becomes much harder to reverse a slide in downloads and spending.
A crowded, messy race for AI video dominance
Sora’s struggles are unfolding in a broader race to define what AI‑driven video platforms should look like. Meta is pushing its own vision of AI‑infused feeds, with its main site promoting a family of products and a dedicated AI app that plugs into the company’s social graph, as highlighted on Meta. Reporting on the next era of social media has described how Meta’s AI app now includes a TikTok‑style video feed called Vibes, which leans heavily on generative clips and recommendation algorithms. In that context, Sora is not just competing with other AI tools, it is competing with platforms that already own the attention graph.
OpenAI itself has acknowledged the risks of building a social‑style video feed around AI. In a blog post about its social product, the company flagged “Concerns about doomscrolling, addiction, isolation and (reinforcement learning)-sloptimized feeds” as top of mind, a line that was quoted in coverage of its Sora social media launch and linked to broader worries about algorithmic feeds. That same coverage noted how Concerns about sloptimized feeds are shaping how regulators and users view AI‑driven video apps. When Sora’s own feed is compared to Meta’s Vibes or TikTok, it is judged not only on creativity but on whether it is adding to what some critics already call “AI slop” in social media.
