Kling AI, Runway, and Vidu Gain Users After OpenAI Closes Sora Video Service

After OpenAI's decision to shut down Sora, the generative video market didn't freeze — the audience almost immediately began transitioning to other platforms. Kling AI, RunwayML, and Vidu are growing fastest against this backdrop, with all three already showing increased user activity in the first week after OpenAI's announcement.

Who's Taking the Audience

The biggest winner in the short term is Kling AI from Kuaishou. According to app market analysts, the service's global weekly audience grew by 4% and reached approximately 2.6 million users.

For a market where habits don't change every day, this is a noticeable jump. What's even more important is this: Kling already had an advantage in monthly audience even before the Sora shutdown news — approximately 7.8 million users in March versus 4.

7 million for OpenAI's product. RunwayML and Vidu are growing more modestly, but in this context even a roughly 1% weekly gain looks significant. Users aren't just reading news about Sora's closure — they're actually testing backup options and starting to move their workflows.

For the AI-video segment, this is an important signal: the OpenAI brand no longer guarantees automatic leadership if there are services available alongside it that are already accessible, understandable, and not in limbo.

Why the Transition Happened So Quickly

OpenAI announced Sora's shutdown on March 24, 2026. The consumer version of the service was disabled on April 26, 2026, and the API is scheduled to close on September 24, 2026. For ordinary users, this is unwelcome news, but for studios, marketing teams, and short-form content creators, it's a practical problem: you can't build a content workflow around a tool that already has a shutdown date. That's why the market responded not with discussion, but with migration. After such an announcement, teams typically don't look at the loudness of a brand name, but at the fundamentals that impact daily work:

• stable access to video generation and editing;
• clear product and API lifecycle timelines;
• ability to quickly integrate the service into an existing production workflow;
• predictable quality of results for advertising, social, and brand videos.

That's exactly why even modest weekly movement at RunwayML and Vidu looks more important than it seems. This isn't random curiosity, but the first signs of demand redistribution in a category where users have long been accustomed to comparing models by actual results, not by announcement loudness.

What's Happening with the Market

Sora's closure doesn't mean cooling interest in AI video. If anything, the opposite: the niche remains attractive to both users and investors. Against this backdrop, Runway and Chinese Shengshu Technology, which develops Vidu, received additional funding in 2026 and continue to invest in product and infrastructure. This makes sense: demand from creators, directors, agencies, and marketing teams hasn't gone anywhere, and the freed-up OpenAI market share makes competition even fiercer.

"We're saying goodbye to Sora," — that's how OpenAI formulated its shutdown announcement on X.

For competitors, this is a rare situation where the market opens up not because of technological failure of the entire category, but because of one of the most visible players exiting. In such moments, the winner isn't the one who promises revolution the loudest, but the one who faster converts interest into a stable product and user retention.

What This Means

The Sora story shows that the AI video market has already become mature enough: if one high-profile service exits, users don't wait months for the next miracle — they immediately redistribute among working alternatives. For business, this is a simple conclusion: in generative video, reliability, development speed, and a clear product development plan now matter more than brand strength alone.