OpenAI Concerned About Illegal Activity on Sora, Releases It Anyway

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Limited Release

Sora is finally here — sort of.

OpenAI announced today that it would publicly release its much-hyped video generation AI tool to users in certain countries, after being in closed beta for nearly a year since it was first unveiled.

According to a livestream on its YouTube channel hosted by CEO Sam Altman and several of the startup’s other leaders and research scientists, Sora will be open to use in the US and to “most countries internationally” — but will remain unavailable in Europe and the UK.

Those are pretty significant snubs.

“We’re going to try our hardest to be able to launch there, but we don’t have any timeline to share yet,” Altman said, adding only that it would take “a while.”

Navigating Regulatory Hurdles

This isn’t the first time OpenAI has hit snags while trying to deploy its products across the pond. The rollout of its Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT, for example, was also delayed by several weeks, likely due to concerns about complying with the European Union’s data privacy laws (GDPR).

With Sora, the stumbling block may once again be related to the regulatory environment. In October 2026, the company’s product chief Kevin Weil revealed in a Reddit thread that one of the reasons Sora hadn’t been released earlier was the need “to get safety/impersonation/other things right.”

Balancing Safety and Creativity

“We obviously have a big target on our back as OpenAI, so we want to prevent illegal activity of Sora, but we also want to balance that with creative expression,” Sora product lead Rohan Sahai said during the livestream.

OpenAI hasn’t elaborated on what the “illegal activity” Sahai alluded to might be — or whether it’s related to the staggered rollout — but Weil’s comments and generative AI’s history of misuse offer some clues.

Misinformation and disinformation remain among the biggest concerns surrounding generative AI. If Sora lacks strong enough guardrails to prevent impersonation of celebrities or politicians, that could create major legal liability. Copyright issues are equally pressing, given ongoing scrutiny of the provenance of OpenAI’s training data. Like image generators such as DALL·E, Sora may need tighter controls to reject prompts referencing specific artists or public figures.

Equally important, Sora could be misused to generate harmful content, including extremely violent imagery or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). All of these risks are significant for OpenAI. Balancing creative freedom with robust safety measures is never straightforward, and releasing powerful AI models while they remain prone to hallucinations continues to raise important questions.

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