Why OpenAI really shut down Sora

OpenAI’s decision last week to discontinue AI video generation tool Sora just six months after it was released to the public raised immediate suspicion. The app had invited users to upload their own faces – so was this some kind of extensive data collection? According to a new WSJ researchthe real explanation is considerably more boring: Sora was a money pit that no one used, and keeping it alive cost OpenAI the AI ​​race.

So what happened? After a splashy launch, Sora’s global user count peaked at around one million, but then dropped to less than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was making about $1 million every day, not because people loved it, but because making videos is so expensive to run. Each user who jumped into a fantastical scene drew on a finite supply of AI chips.

While an entire team within OpenAI focused on making Sora work, Anthropic quietly won over the software engineers and enterprises that generate the revenue. Claude Code in particular was eating OpenAI’s lunch.

So CEO Sam Altman made the decision: kill Sora, free up computing power and refocus. To understand how sudden this was, consider what happened to Disney, according to the WSJ: The entertainment giant had committed $1 billion to the partnership, but still found out that Sora was closed less than an hour before the public. The deal died with it.