OpenAI Is Pulling the Plug on Sora

OpenAI announced this week that it's shutting down Sora, its AI video generation app. The standalone app, the developer API, and ChatGPT's video feature are all going away. The Sora team posted a short goodbye on X, thanking users and acknowledging the news would be disappointing.

Sora launched as a standalone app in September 2025 and briefly took off, hitting the top of Apple's App Store. But the momentum didn't last. By January 2026, downloads had dropped 45%. The math wasn't working. Video generation eats up massive amounts of compute, and OpenAI is trying to get its finances in order before a potential IPO later this year.

The Disney Deal Is Dead Too

The shutdown also killed a high-profile deal with Disney. The two companies had announced a partnership in December 2025 that would let Sora users generate videos with Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters, with Disney investing $1 billion.

So What's Next?

The Sora team isn't disappearing. They're being reassigned to work on robotics and what OpenAI calls 'world model' research. The bigger picture is OpenAI pulling back from consumer experiments and focusing on products that actually make money, like its coding tool Codex and the desktop *super app* it's building.