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OpenAI has unexpectedly shut down its text-to-video app Sora, without any clear explanation – sparking plenty of speculation.
OpenAI first unveiled Sora back at the end of 2024, launching it as a standalone app in September 2025, and signing a $1bn deal with Disney in December. And now it’s done.
The closure is unquestionably sudden. The Sora team posted on social media about new editing tools just last week, while OpenAI itself unveiled additional safety tools for the model and app two days before the closure was announced. Reports suggest teams from Disney and OpenAI met Monday regarding a joint project, then found out about the closure half an hour later.
In a social media post, the Sora team said: “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.”
The post added: “We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.”
Beyond Sora, reports also suggest OpenAI had paused its plans to release an “erotic” version of its ChatGPT chatbot. The move comes as OpenAI plans to create a “superapp” including ChatGPT, its Codex coding tool, and its browser. The company said ChatGPT’s image generator will remain in the chatbot.
In a statement sent to TechFinitive, an OpenAI spokesperson said: “We’ve decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API. As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.”
OpenAI reportedly told staff that the aim was to refocus on “physical AI” such as robotics and other longer plays – indeed, Fidji Simo’s job title has gone from Head of Applications to AGI Deployment. Other reports, including one in the Wall Street Journal that broke the story, said the intent was to refocus resources on productivity tools, with reports saying Simo had called for an end to “side quests” in order to “nail productivity”.
That fits with what a spokesperson for Disney said, suggesting that the decision was made to enable OpenAI to focus on other areas of the business: “As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere.
“We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators,” the Disney spokesperson added.
The FT noted that the now-defunct $1bn deal between the two companies hadn’t been completed, and no money had changed hands.
At the end of last year, Sora restricted the number of videos that could be generated by free users to just six a day. At the time, OpenAI’s head of Sora Bill Peebles posted on social media: “Our GPUs are melting, and we want to let as many people access sora as possible!”
Similar restrictions were seen at Google’s Nano Banana Pro image generation tool at the same time.
Generating videos and images requires plenty of processing power, and given a lack of GPU supply – not to mention rising energy costs – it’s no wonder such companies are considering pivoting away from high cost, low paying consumer nonsense like producing memes.
OpenAI cutting its losses on Sora makes some sense. It has never been the best-in-market video generating tool, has sparked problems with racist and violent videos, and is expensive to run, in particular in compute terms.
Focusing on more serious pursuits makes sense as an IPO is looming, too – who wants heavy costs and potential PR disasters when you’re focusing on share prices? The same follows when trying to convince investors that you’re serious business, and OpenAI needs more cash to keep its development work moving forward.
Putting more money into productivity tools makes sense as that can help pay the bills. After all, that’s worked for rival Anthropic, which makes headlines for tools seen as so useful that their announcement crashes stock prices of affected markets.
But it also raises the spectre that fine-tuning these AI models into truly useful tools for specific industries (let alone AGI) may prove harder than making meme machines that can write emails. Whether that can happen before the money – and hype – runs out remains to be seen.
