Why did OpenAI shut down Sora already?

OpenAI’s decision last week to shut down Sora, its AI-powered video generation tool, just six months after its public launch, raised immediate skepticism. The app invited users to upload their faces, so was this some kind of elaborate data grab? According to a new investigation by the Wall Street Journal, the real explanation is considerably more boring: Sora was a money pit that no one used, and keeping it alive was costing OpenAI the AI ​​race.

So what happened? After the impressive launch, Sora’s worldwide user count peaked at around 1 million and then collapsed to less than 500,000. At the same time, the app was consuming nearly $1 million a day — not because people liked it but because video creation was too expensive to run. Each user who dropped themselves into a fantasy scene would withdraw a limited amount of AI chips.

While an entire team within OpenAI was focused on making Sora a success, Anthropic was quietly acquiring software engineers and revenue-generating organizations. Claude Code, in particular, had OpenAI’s lunch.

So, CEO Sam Altman made the decision: kill Sora, free up computing, and refocus. If you want to understand how surprising this was, consider what happened to Disney, according to the Wall Street Journal: The entertainment giant had committed $1 billion to the partnership, yet discovered that Sora had been shut down less than an hour before the audience. The deal died with him.