"Why OpenAI killed Sora" 28 March 2026

...[OpenAI] announced that it would scrap its video-generation app, Sora, and reverse plans for video generation inside ChatGPT; it would wind down a $1 billion Disney deal; it would shuffle the role of a high-level executive; and it would raise an additional $10 billion from investors, adding up to more than $120 billion total for its latest funding round.

OpenAI is now in a frenzy to turn a profit, or at least lose less money. Since its launch, Sora seems to have taken up a massive amount of compute without the financial return to justify it. Industry sources told The Verge that it’s been lagging behind competing video-generation models. But despite its short life, it’s leaving behind a legacy of eroded trust in judging what’s real...

...The Sora shutdown news came one day after OpenAI published a blog post about how to use Sora safely, saying the company was continuing to “strengthen Sora’s guardrails” and introduce stricter protections for videos featuring kids and teens...

...Sam Gregory, executive director at Witness, a nonprofit fighting against deceptive AI and deepfakes, says he’s not sorry about the loss of a tool to generate “AI slop.” But he is incensed that “in the absence of real money, real investment, real will,” things only seem to change for business reasons, not real harm.

“Sora launched with a splash in terms of this ability to create hyper-realistic content… what angers me actually is what they normalized in the period of six months, a set of things that I think have really long-lasting implications,” Gregory said. “They normalized a world in which in multiple seconds people are really uncertain about what they are seeing in their timelines both when it matters and when it doesn’t matter… whether it’s casual comedy… or conflict footage from Iran.” He added, “The consequences will reverberate even if the app is gone.”..

...“We’ve decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told The Verge in a statement, pointing to an X post promising more information on timelines for winding down the app and API soon. “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.”..