OpenAI’s decision last week Shutting down Sora, its artificial intelligence video generation tool, just six months after launching it to the public raised immediate suspicions. The app had invited users to upload their own faces. So was this some kind of elaborate data collection? According to a new WSJ investigationthe real explanation is considerably more boring: Sora was a money pit that no one used, and keeping him alive was costing OpenAI the AI race.
So what happened? After an eye-catching launch, the number of Sora users worldwide peaked at around one million and then collapsed to less than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was consuming about $1 million every day, not because people loved it but because video generation is so expensive to run. Each user dropped into a fantasy scene consumed a finite supply of AI chips.
While an entire team within OpenAI was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over software engineers and revenue-generating companies. Claude Code, in particular, was eating OpenAI’s lunch.
So CEO Sam Altman made the decision: kill Sora, free up computing, and refocus. If you want to understand how sudden this was, consider what happened to Disney, according to the WSJ: The entertainment giant had committed $1 billion to the partnership, but found out they were closing Sora less than an hour before the public. The deal died with him.
