Why OpenAI shut down Sora

The concept of OpenAI last week to shut down Sora, its AI video creation tool, just six months after releasing it to the public raised the same doubts. The app invited users to upload their faces – so was this some form of general data? According to the new WSJ searchThe real explanation is pretty boring: Sora was a money pit that no one was using, and staying alive was costing OpenAI the AI ​​race.

So what happened? After a splashy launch, the number of Sora users worldwide peaked at around one million and dropped to less than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was burning about a million dollars a day – not because people liked it but because video production is very expensive to run. Every user who landed in the fun zone was downloading the AI ​​chips.

While the rest of the team within OpenAI was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over software developers and businesses that were driving revenue. Claude Code, in particular, was eating OpenAI’s lunch.

So CEO Sam Altman made the call: kill Sora, free the computer, and reevaluate. If you want to understand how this happened suddenly, consider what happened to Disney, according to the WSJ: the entertainment giant gave $ 1 billion to the contract, but found that Sora was closed less than an hour before the public. The agreement died with it.