HeyGen Video 1
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
HeyGen, known for AI avatar videos, released its own general video model, HeyGen Video 1, around Sept 30, 2026.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 25 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra153 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.592 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon183 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7122 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 92 days before it.
Key facts
- Release date not printed by HeyGen; Sept 30, 2026 is OpenRouter’s listing date and HeyGen’s changelog says ‘September 2026’
- Text-, image- and reference-to-video with dialogue and sound effects generated together; styles from live action to claymation and anime
- API: 480p to 2K, 16:9 / 9:16 / 1:1, seeds and webhooks; free web demo (two 5 s 768p clips a day)
- Launch API price $0.01 per second ‘through October’
- HeyGen’s page says it ranked first on Artificial Analysis’ video leaderboard; read on 2026-10-25 it was #3, Elo 1160
What happened
HeyGen moved beyond avatar videos with a general video model that writes and voices its own dialogue. It is available in the HeyGen app, as a free demo and through HeyGen’s API and OpenRouter at a promotional price of one cent per second.
Why it matters
A cheap, top-five video model from an application company shows how quickly video generation has commoditised in 2026.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- HeyGen: Introducing HeyGen Videoheygen.com, official
- OpenRouter: HeyGen Video 1openrouter.ai, docs
Changes
- Filed. Exact release date unverified