OpenAI’s decision last week to shut down its AI video generation tool Sora, just six months after its public release, sparked immediate suspicion. The app asked users to upload their faces, but was this some kind of elaborate data collection? According to a new WSJ study, the real explanation is pretty boring. Sora was a treasure trove of untapped gold, and keeping it alive was costing OpenAI in its AI race.
So what happened? After a splashy launch, Sora’s global user base peaked at about 1 million, but has since declined to less than 500,000. During that time, the app was consuming about $1 million per day. Not because people like the app, but because video generation is very expensive to operate. Everyone who threw themselves into the fantasy scene was using up their finite AI chips.
While the entire team within OpenAI was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning the hearts of revenue-generating software engineers and companies. Claude Code in particular was eating OpenAI’s lunch.
CEO Sam Altman called for people to shut down Sora, free up computing, and refocus. If you want to know how sudden this was, consider what happened to Disney, WSJ reports. The entertainment giant had pledged $1 billion to the partnership, only to learn less than an hour after its release that Sora would be shut down. The contract was then extinguished.
