OpenAI Shuts Down Sora, Its AI Video App That Raised Safety Concerns

Sora, OpenAI's first standalone app after ChatGPT, rose to the top of the iPhone App Store soon after its September launch. Six months later, it was gone.

OpenAI announced in a brief social media message Tuesday that it was "saying goodbye to the Sora app" and that it would share more soon about how to preserve what users had already created. "What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing," the company said.

The company behind ChatGPT released Sora in September as an attempt to capture the attention, and potentially advertising dollars, that follow short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube, or Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook. Sora hit a million downloads within days of it being made available as a standalone app. But the platform never escaped the controversies that shadowed it from its earliest days.

A growing chorus of advocacy groups, academics, and experts expressed concern about the dangers of letting people create AI videos using whatever prompt comes to mind, leading to the proliferation of nonconsensual images and realistic deepfakes. OpenAI was forced to crack down on AI creations of public figures, among them Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mister Rogers, doing outlandish things, but only after an outcry from family estates and an actors' union.

In September, OpenAI debuted a second-generation Sora model that created even higher-quality videos with audio capabilities and more accurate physics, which led to even more intense blowback and concern from Hollywood. OpenAI paired the new model's launch with the standalone app.

The shutdown carries significant financial consequences beyond OpenAI's own balance sheet. Disney, which had made a deal with OpenAI last year to bring its characters to Sora, said in a statement Tuesday that it respects OpenAI's "decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere." It is unclear how much of the $1 billion Disney had handed over to OpenAI and whether the company would recoup it. Disney had also been set to license 250 of its characters to the platform.

Inside OpenAI, the calculus appeared to be as much about resources as reputation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that ending Sora will free up resources for OpenAI's next-generation AI models, according to The Information. An OpenAI spokesperson said the Sora research team would continue to focus on "world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks." The company added it needed to make trade-offs on products with high compute costs.

By shifting computing resources away from Sora, OpenAI could reallocate chips to more lucrative coding, reasoning, or text-generation tasks. Just weeks ago, the company announced it had raised $110 billion in fresh funding, vaulting its total valuation to roughly $730 billion.

OpenAI said it is "exploring ways to support export and preservation" of user content from the app, though no timeline or technical specifics have been released. The app's brief, turbulent run now stands as one of the starkest examples yet of how quickly AI products can climb to cultural relevance, and fall just as fast under the weight of harms they enable.