Snapchats new AI Clips Lens format turns photos into five-second videos | TechCrunch

Snapchat announced on Tuesday that it’s launching AI Clips in Lens Studio, its platform that lets creators design and publish AR and AI effects called Lenses. The new Clips are an AI-powered Lens format that transforms a single photo into a five-second video.

Unlike open-ended text-to-video tools, AI Clips are designed as a closed-prompt experience, where Lens creators design the Lens, and users can tap it to generate a video from their own photos.

For example, a Lens creator could design a Lens that allows users to generate a video of themselves walking down a red carpet using their own photo.

Snapchat says both experienced and new developers can use the new Lens format to turn a single prompt into a published Lens in minutes without the need for external tools.

AI Clips are available to Snapchat users who are subscribed to that platform’s Lens+ offering, which costs $8.99 per month. As its name suggests, Lens+gives users access to exclusive Lenses and AR experiences, along with the features available as part of the standard Snapchat+ subscription.

“For the first time, developers can build and publish photo-to-video AI directly to Snapchat from the GenAI Suite in Lens Studio,” Snapchat wrote in a blog post. “There’s currently nothing else on the market that combines closed-prompt AI video generation with direct photo input, real distribution, and monetization.”

Lens creators enrolled in Lens+ Payouts, Snapchat’s monetization program that allows developers to earn money from their Lenses, can earn revenue from the AI Clips they create.

Snapchat isn’t the only platform focused on letting users create AI clips from their own photos, as YouTube announced last week that it was rolling out “Reimagine,” a new feature that lets users transform a single frame from an existing YouTube Short into an eight-second clip using their own photo.

The launch of AI Clips comes the same day that Snapchat announced that users created nearly two trillion Snaps, or 63,000 Snaps per second, in 2025.