OpenAI is Killing its Sora Video Generator

OpenAI is sunsetting Sora, its AI-powered video generation app that launched on iOS and Android last fall. The app allowed users to create videos with sound effects with just a text prompt or an image, and Sora also had a social component, as users could follow other video creators, remix their videos, and more.

According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the app’s retirement to the company’s staff yesterday. The exec also said that OpenAI would retire the Sora API for developers, as well as the Sora-powered video generation capabilities in ChatGPT.

In December, OpenAI announced a three-year licensing agreement with The Walt Disney Company to make over 200 Disney characters available for video creation in Sora. As part of the AI licensing deal, Disney was also set to invest $1 billion into OpenAI, but that won’t happen anymore. “As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokeswoman told the WSJ.

We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.

We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on…

— Sora (@soraofficialapp) March 24, 2026

Sora enjoyed a brief viral moment when it was released on mobile platforms last fall, and many saw it as an attempt to compete with TikTok and other apps with a social feed of vertical videos. “At the time, some OpenAI employees were surprised by the amount of computing resources the company poured into the project, given the lack of clear evidence of demand for the product,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Well, Sora’s retirement is a clear sign that OpenAI’s priorities are shifting. “We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts. That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want,” said Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s Chief of Applications in an internal note with employees seen by the WSJ.

OpenAI is reportedly hard at work on a new ‘superapp’ that will combine ChatGPT, its Codex coding platform, and Atlas AI web browser. If ChatGPT recently crossed 900 million weekly active users, it remains to be seen if there’s really a demand for an all-in-one app from OpenAI.