Sam Altman went on record this week with a detailed explanation of why OpenAI is killing Sora. The reasons are more revealing than you might expect.
A Million Dollars a Day
Sora was burning through roughly a million dollars per day in operating costs. Video generation is extraordinarily compute-intensive, and user numbers never justified the expense. From a peak of about one million active users, the count dropped below 500,000. The app shuts down on April 26, with the API following in September.
The Disney Deal Falls Apart
What many people don’t know: OpenAI had a licensing agreement with Disney that allowed Disney characters to appear in Sora. Altman personally called Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro to break the news. Both companies are reportedly looking for other ways to collaborate.
Ethics Played a Role
Here’s a surprising angle: Altman openly admits that he deliberately avoided adding features that would have made Sora more commercially successful — because they would have created addictive engagement patterns. With recent jury rulings against Meta and Google over addictive design, OpenAI didn’t want to take that risk.
Strategic Pivot
The Sora team isn’t being dissolved. Instead, they’ll work on world simulation models for robotics. Compute and product capacity are being redirected toward what Altman calls ‘the next generation of automated researchers and companies.‘
My Take
The Sora shutdown is a rare moment of honesty in the AI industry. Instead of keeping a loss-making product alive and waving around hype metrics, OpenAI is pulling the plug. That deserves some credit — even if it highlights that consumer-facing video AI just doesn’t work as a product yet.
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