OpenAI will shut down its Sora app, which allowed people to generate short-form videos with artificial intelligence (AI).
The company announced the shutdown in a post to its Sora account on X (Twitter) and said it would share more information soon, such as timelines for the app and API shutdowns as well as options for preserving generated videos.
“We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. 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,” OpenAI said in the post.
OpenAI first announced Sora in early 2024, but didn’t launch the text-to-video generation model until September 2025. When it did release, it sparked concerns about copyright infringement, impersonation, and deepfakes — not to mention the ongoing issues with AI-generated slop filling up the internet. While OpenAI calls the shutdown “disappointing,” many are cheering Sora’s failure.
Perhaps the most notable thing that came out of Sora was that the famously litigious Disney agreed to a US$1 billion (about C$1.38 billion) investment in OpenAI as part of a larger plan to incorporate Sora-generated videos into its Disney+ streaming platform. It’s not entirely clear why Disney, which has aggressively protected its copyright for years, was suddenly cool with putting a copyright infringement machine directly into its flagship streaming platform. The most likely answer is money, and a desire to pay workers less of it while using AI to generate content instead.
Whatever the company’s motives, thankfully, the deal is dead. The Hollywood Reporter reported that Disney is exiting the deal, though a spokesperson told the publication that Disney “will continue to engage with AI platforms.” So, I guess AI slop isn’t entirely off the table for the House of Mouse.
The Sora shutdown comes as OpenAI is attempting to refocus on business and productivity. Reporting on details from a recent OpenAI all-hands meeting revealed that the company wanted to change focus and stop getting sidetracked with “side quests.” OpenAI executives reportedly called the success of competitor Anthropic and its Claude AI a “wake-up call.”
Sora definitely fits the bill for a side quest, and an expensive one at that. OpenAI reportedly blew as much as US$15 million (about C$21 million) per day on generating AI slop videos. Yikes.
Source: Sora (Twitter) Via: CBC News
