Sora’s downloads in its first week was nearly as big as ChatGPT’s launch (techcrunch.com)

App intelligence firm Appfigures reports that Sora, a new video-generating app, amassed about 627,000 iOS downloads in its first seven days (Sept. 30–Oct. 6, 2025), briefly reaching No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. That total edges slightly past ChatGPT’s 606,000 iOS installs in its debut week, though Sora launched in both the U.S. and Canada (roughly 45,000 Canadian installs), so its U.S.-only figure would be about 582,000—roughly 96% of ChatGPT’s initial iOS uptake. Daily downloads peaked at ~107,800 on Oct. 1 and have held between ~84,400–98,500 since, notable given Sora remains invite-only. The signal is important for AI/ML: consumer demand for generative video is surging and can rival blockbuster chatbot launches, putting Sora on par with recent debuts like xAI’s Grok and ahead of Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft Copilot in early momentum. Sora uses the Sora 2 video model to produce highly realistic footage, which has accelerated viral deepfakes and prompted ethical backlash (e.g., Zelda Williams asking people to stop creating AI-generated images of her late father). Technically, this underscores both the rapid deployment of powerful multimodal models and the urgent need for robust content moderation, provenance tools, and policy guardrails as high-fidelity synthetic video becomes widely available.