Sora’s first week on iOS in the US was nearly as big as ChatGPT’s (techcrunch.com)

OpenAI’s new video app Sora reached roughly 627,000 iOS downloads in its first seven days (Sept. 30–Oct. 6, 2025), narrowly outpacing ChatGPT’s initial iOS week (606,000) according to Appfigures. The caveat: Sora launched in both the U.S. and Canada, and about 45,000 installs came from Canada—putting its U.S.-only performance at roughly 96% of ChatGPT’s launch. Despite being invite-only, Sora climbed to No. 3 on day one and hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store by Oct. 3, with a download peak of ~107,800 on Oct. 1 and daily installs since ranging from ~84k–98k. Beyond raw metrics, the launch matters because Sora uses the Sora 2 video model to generate highly realistic video content, including deepfakes, and has already proliferated across social media. That consumer-level appetite for AI-generated video signals a rapid mainstreaming of multimodal generative models and intensifies urgent technical and policy questions: content moderation at scale, watermarking and provenance, detection of synthetic media, and legal/ethical limits (illustrated by backlash to deepfakes of deceased public figures). For the AI/ML community, Sora’s debut is a reminder that production-ready video models are rapidly moving from research demos to mass-market apps, forcing priorities toward robustness, safety engineering, and deployable guardrails.