- OpenAI announced on March 24 that Sora’s app will shut down April 26, with the API following on September 24.
- The AI video generator peaked at roughly 1 million users before collapsing to under 500,000 — while burning an estimated $1 million per day.
- Disney’s planned $1 billion investment in OpenAI is off the table after the company was notified less than an hour before the public announcement.
- OpenAI says the Sora research team will pivot to “world simulation research” for robotics.
A $1 Million-a-Day Money Pit With No Users
OpenAI is killing Sora, its AI video generation app, barely six months after launch. The app will go dark on April 26. The API gets a longer runway — September 24 — to let developers migrate. The reason is brutally simple: Sora was hemorrhaging cash with almost no one using it.
According to a Wall Street Journal investigation cited by TechCrunch, Sora’s worldwide user count peaked at around 1 million shortly after its late 2025 launch, then cratered to fewer than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was burning through roughly $1 million every single day in inference costs — video generation is spectacularly expensive to run at scale. Lifetime revenue from in-app purchases totaled just $2.1 million. The math never worked.
Disney Walks, OpenAI Pivots to Robotics
The fallout extends far beyond product. Disney had committed $1 billion to a partnership with OpenAI, including a licensing agreement that would have let users generate videos featuring Disney characters inside Sora. That deal is dead. Disney reportedly learned of the shutdown less than an hour before the public announcement — a jarring move for a partner of that scale. The transaction never closed.
OpenAI is framing the retreat as strategic focus. The company says the Sora research team will now concentrate on “world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.” Translation: the compute that was rendering 10-second clips of imaginary dogs running on beaches will be redirected toward training models that can navigate the physical world. Whether that pivot produces results or simply burns cash in a different direction remains to be seen.
The shutdown is already being called a reality check moment for AI video. If OpenAI — the best-funded AI company on Earth — couldn’t make consumer video generation sustainable, the entire sector has a unit economics problem that hype alone won’t solve.
