OpenAI’s newest experiment, Sora, is off to a rocket-fueled start on the App Store, even though you can’t actually use it without an invite.
The AI video app, which quietly rolled out to US and Canadian iOS users this week, racked up 56,000 downloads on day one and snagged the No. 3 spot on Apple’s Top Overall chart by day two, according to analytics firm Appfigures. (Via: TechCrunch)
Not bad for an app that most people can’t get into yet.
All told, Sora saw 164,000 installs across its first two days (September 30th and October 1st).
That puts it in a rarefied AI company. Its debut matched Elon Musk’s xAI-backed Grok app and blew past Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot, which managed only 21,000 and 7,000 downloads on day one, respectively.
The only bigger first-day splashes came from ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, which each topped 80,000.
Of course, those comparisons come with caveats. Some AI apps, like Grok, launched in multiple countries, while others (like Claude) never really said who could download at first.
Appfigures even had to crunch apples-to-apples data just to keep it fair, focusing on US and Canadian installs.
Still, the numbers suggest there’s a serious appetite for AI-generated video wrapped in a social-media-style package, even if you can’t help but imagine the chaos of thousands of new users cranking out surreal, meme-ready clips at scale.
That, naturally, has sparked some side-eye within OpenAI itself.
While Sora’s popularity screams “consumer hit,” some employees reportedly grumble that the company should be working on weightier problems than making it easier for teens to generate uncanny deepfakes of Sam Altman muttering, “Are my piggies enjoying their slop?”
But hey, who’s to say that isn’t advancing humanity in its own weird way?
For now, OpenAI can bask in Sora’s early glow: a viral launch, top-chart rankings, and proof that AI video is ready for the mainstream spotlight.
Does Sora’s App Store success prove people are genuinely excited about AI-generated video, or are we just downloading apps we’ll abandon once the novelty wears off? Should OpenAI be celebrated for making AI video accessible to millions, or criticized for prioritizing viral apps over solving harder problems? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion to our Twitter or Facebook.
