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- OpenAI announced it is discontinuing its viral video app Sora.
- The company plans to focus on robotics to solve "real-world, physical tasks," a spokesperson said.
- Sora's demise followed its lead staffer's description of the project's economics as "unsustainable."
OpenAI is pulling the plug on the Sora app — at least in the current form.
The company confirmed it will discontinue Sora as a consumer app and API, marking a sharp pivot away from one of its splashiest generative video experiments.
"We've decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API," an OpenAI spokesperson said. "As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks."
The discontinuation is a notable turn for a product that once embodied OpenAI's creative ambitions. When Sora launched in late September 2025, it quickly went viral for generating realistic, cinematic video clips from text prompts.
The TikTok-esque app hit No. 1 on Apple's App Store and hit 1 million downloads in under five days, according to October posts from Sora lead Bill Peebles, who described "surging growth" as the team raced to keep up with demand.
Headaches began almost as quickly as the hypetrain took off. OpenAI had to introduce guardrails after users generated videos of protected intellectual property, such as Pokémon's Pikachu in "Saving Private Ryan," and of historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr.
Even Cameo, the short-form video app where users can pay for personalized messages, sued OpenAI for trademark infringement after OpenAI named one of the Sora app's core features "cameo." (OpenAI later changed the name of the feature.)
Altman doubled down, saying that IP rights holders wanted to work with OpenAI.
The move to scrap Sora comes as OpenAI is increasingly focused on core products as it attempts to make money ahead of a potential IPO. In August, CEO Sam Altman hired Fidji Simo, the 40-year-old former Instacart CEO and longtime Meta executive, to become the company's product head. She and the company are tasked with ensuring their powerful models can sustain the enormous cost of training and deployment.
"We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," Simo told employees at an all-hands meeting, according to a person familiar with her remarks. The company needs to nail productivity — primarily on the business side, and then on the consumer side, she said. "Everything else is going to have to take a backseat to those priorities."
Tuesday's announcement came three months after Disney announced that it would become the first major content license holder with OpenAI, as part of a three-year deal that included a $1 billion investment in the platform.
In December, Disney announced that it would become the first major content license holder on the platform as part of a three-year deal that included a $1 billion investment in OpenAI.
Disney acknowledged OpenAI's move on Tuesday.
"As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere," a spokesperson from The Walt Disney Company said. "We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators."
OpenAI quickly made moves to try to monetize Sora's growing user base and to limit free video generations. At the time, Peebles, in posts on X, framed the economics of the heavy demand for Sora as "completely unsustainable," adding that "video models really are expensive!"