Why is OpenAI shutting down Sora despite its meteoric success?

The message posted on X by OpenAI is explicit, thanking everyone who created, shared, and built a community with Sora. Six months after its meteoric rise, Sora has just been discontinued. No one saw it coming, so why such a decision? Sora had garnered nearly a million downloads in less than five days. It had even reached the top spot on Apple's App Store.

A Popular Success That Came at Too High a Price

The initial experience was clearly impressive; Sora truly had everything going for it. The application allowed users to generate short videos, remix other users' creations, and publish them in a shared feed. The concept was an instant hit.

But behind the impressive download figures lay two problems.

Costs

Video generation is one of the most computationally intensive tasks. At a time when OpenAI researchers were leaving the company due to insufficient access to computing resources to advance their work, maintaining a consumer video generation application became difficult to justify internally.

Controversies

From its launch, Sora generated a multitude of problematic content, including celebrities without their consent, copyrighted characters, and content infringing intellectual property. OpenAI had to block the creation of videos depicting Martin Luther King Jr. Moderation was therefore a constant challenge.

Disney loses a billion dollars in this affair

The closure of Sora has a major collateral victim: Disney. In December 2025, the studio reached an agreement with OpenAI to allow the use of its characters in the app. It committed to investing one billion dollars. The transaction was never finalized. Disney confirmed the end of the collaboration, but the company is open to other partnerships. The closure of Sora will be good news for others like Mirage, which also focuses on short videos. He's not the only one.

• Google, with its Veo 3 generator and its integration with YouTube Shorts.
• ByteDance with Seedance 2.0.
• Meta with Vibes integrated into the Meta AI application.

They all now have a clear path ahead of them!

Open AI no longer wants to spread itself too thin

Apparently, Sora isn't a failure, but it's a victim of OpenAI's strategy. Remember, AI changes every day, and new products appear regularly. So, Sam Altman announced to his teams a reorganization focused on AI agents and coding tools. This is clearly a response to Anthropic's progress with Claude and the increasing pressure ahead of a potential IPO. The company, whose annualized revenue is estimated at $20 billion, but whose costs are exploding even faster, has to make some choices.