OpenAI’s decision last week to shut down its AI video creation tool, Sora, just six months after it was available to the public raised immediate suspicion. The app invited users to upload their faces. So was this some kind of sophisticated data collection? According to a new WSJ investigation, the real explanation is much more boring. Sora was a money pit that no one was using, and maintaining it was costing OpenAI the AI race.
So what happened? After its splashy launch, Sora’s global user base peaked at around 1 million before declining to less than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was generating around $1 million per day. Not because people like the app, but because video creation costs too much money to run. Everyone who jumped into the fantasy scene had a limited supply of AI chips.
While the entire OpenAI internal team was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over revenue-generating software engineers and companies. In particular, Claude Code was eating OpenAI’s lunch.
So CEO Sam Altman’s call was to kill Sora, free up the compute, and refocus. If you want to understand how sudden this is, consider what happened to Disney, according to WSJ. The entertainment giant invested $1 billion in the partnership, but learned Sora was closing less than an hour before it was scheduled to go public. That was the end of the deal.
