OpenAI plans to shut down its video generator Sora in a sudden retreat from the video market.
What’s new: OpenAI will discontinue Sora, a high-profile follow-up to ChatGPT that the company had hoped would become another mass-market sensation, to reallocate resources to more profitable investments, The Wall Street Journal reported. Access to the model via web and app will end on April 26, and the API will close on September 24. The Sora team will be redirected to longer-term projects such as world models and robotics. In addition, OpenAI will consolidate its browser, the coding tool Codex, and the ChatGPT app into a single desktop application, The Wall Street Journal wrote in a separate report.
How it works: Sora produces high-definition videos of up to 25 seconds long that earned acclaim for their realism and visual quality. However, generating each clip takes minutes and requires a much larger amount of processing power than producing text or images. OpenAI previewed the model in February 2024. It updated the model and made it available via an iOS app in September 2025.
- The bulk of Sora’s revenue comes from subscribers to OpenAI’s paid plans. Sora is available in three tiers: Users of the app could generate about five free 10-second videos a day (by invitation only). ChatGPT Plus subscribers ($20 monthly) can use Sora 2 to generate a limited number of 15-second clips in 1280x720-pixel resolution. ChatGPT Pro subscribers ($200 monthly) can use the more-advanced Sora 2 Pro model to generate videos up to 25 seconds long in 1920x1080-pixel resolution.
- Sora has been losing roughly $1 million a day. Its number of daily active users peaked at around 1,000,000 shortly after the mobile app’s launch but soon fell to less than half that amount.
- Before announcing the shutdown on the X social network, OpenAI reportedly diverted Sora’s processing resources to running a new AI model, code named Spud, that powers various coding and enterprise products.
- The Sora team had proposed training a new model that would generate videos within ChatGPT, possibly as an alternative to the Sora app. Faced with the high cost of training another video model, the company chose to cancel video generation altogether.
- As of this writing, Sora 2 Pro places 19th on Artificial Analysis’ text-to-video leaderboard, well behind competing models by ByteDance, Kling, xAI, and Google.
Behind the news: In late 2025, OpenAI took advantage of Sora to form a high-profile partnership with Disney. OpenAI would license Disney characters and train its models on Disney footage, and Disney would invest up to $1 billion in OpenAI. Disney planned to show Sora videos on its streaming service Disney+ and use Sora to help create pre-production visualizations, marketing campaigns, and special effects. With Sora’s impending demise, the partnership is effectively over.
Why it matters: OpenAI has surrendered leadership in video generation, clearing the way for other companies — among several strong contenders — to vie for dominance. When it launched Sora two years ago, OpenAI envisioned another ChatGPT moment. It wanted its generated videos to thrill the mass market and achieve maximum cultural impact. But the arithmetic didn’t make sense. Video generation didn’t attract as many paid subscribers as applications for business and coding, and the costs of training and running video models proved too great to bear.
We’re thinking: The era in which an AI demo — however impressive — is sufficient to establish leadership may be drawing to a close. The field is maturing rapidly, and creating sustainable value is becoming a top priority.