OpenAI has announced it is shutting down its AI video generation app Sora, which it launched to considerable fanfare last September. “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app,” the company wrote in a post on X.
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. We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.
The Sora Team
OpenAI said it is shutting the standalone app to focus on other priorities, with a spokesperson saying the Sora research team would continue work on world simulation research to advance robotics for real-world physical tasks.
The company acknowledged it needed to make trade-offs on products with high compute costs. As a reason for the pivot, the shutdown aligns with OpenAI’s recent shift in strategy toward enterprise customers, especially coders and data analysts, as it tries to chart a path to profitability.
The standalone Sora app was released in September 2025, following a public preview in February 2024 and the first public model release in December of that year.
It hit one million downloads in under five days after its September launch and rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store, but the initial excitement dissipated quickly.
By early 2026, the app was recording steady month-over-month declines in both new installs and user spending, with Appfigures data showing the initial buzz had largely worn off.
The closure comes with significant collateral damage. Disney, which had agreed to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and licensed some of its characters for use on Sora, is exiting the deal as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
Under the three-year licensing agreement announced in December, Sora would have been able to generate user-prompted videos featuring more than 200 masked, animated, or creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars, with Disney+ set to carry a curated selection of the resulting videos.
OpenAI said the move is part of a broader strategy to build a “super app” consolidating ChatGPT, its Codex coding tool, and its web browser into a single interface, as it refocuses on enterprise and developer customers where rival Anthropic has made rapid gains.
The Sora closure is one piece of a wider picture of strain at OpenAI. The company reported a quarterly loss of $11.5 billion, derived from Microsoft’s financial disclosures, which showed a $3.1 billion hit to Microsoft’s net income from its 27% stake in OpenAI.
HSBC analysts have projected that OpenAI still will not be profitable by 2030, even as its consumer base grows, and that the company faces a $207 billion funding shortfall that must be filled through additional debt, equity, or more aggressive revenue generation.
Those projections are grounded in compute commitments of $300 billion to Oracle, $250 billion to Microsoft, and $38 billion to Amazon Web Services.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Pentagon deal earlier this month triggered a surge in ChatGPT uninstalls as users abandoned the platform, with many switching to Anthropic’s Claude, which briefly overtook ChatGPT as the top free app in Apple’s US App Store.
Sam Altman later admitted the rollout had been rushed and “looked opportunistic and sloppy,” subsequently amending the contract to clarify restrictions on domestic surveillance.
