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OpenAI announced the shutdown of Sora, its platform for generating videos and images using artificial intelligence based on text descriptions, just six months after its official launch as a standalone application.
The Sora team announced the decision through their profile on X with a farewell message to their user community.
"We say goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built a community around it: thank you. What you created was important, and we know this news is disappointing," wrote the platform's team.
The first version of Sora emerged in February 2024, as a prototype that could generate video from text. Over time, it expanded its capabilities and functions to share the generated content within the platform itself.
At the end of September, OpenAI launched it as a standalone app, similar to TikTok, but with a significant difference: With Sora 2, users could share their videos, but these were generated by artificial intelligence.
The reasons for the closure are numerous. Despite reaching one million initial downloads and becoming the most downloaded app in the photos and videos category of the App Store, Sora generated only between 1.5 and 2.1 million dollars in revenue during its six months of operation.
Downloads fell by 45% in January of this year, while operating costs—each video consumed GPU-intensive resources—made the business model unsustainable.
This was compounded by the increasing competition from rival tools such as Runway, Kling from Kuaishou, and Seedance 2.0 from ByteDance, which offered resolutions of up to 2K and shorter generation times.
OpenAI, the same company behind ChatGPT, is now redirecting its resources towards projects deemed strategic in preparation for a potential IPO: the development of GPT-5, the reasoning model o3, robotics projects like Atlas and Codex, and a "superapp" based on ChatGPT.
The company currently has 900 million weekly users, 50 million subscribers, and 9 million business users.
The closure occurs paradoxically at its moment of greatest financial strength.
In February, OpenAI closed the largest funding round in the history of the tech sector: $110 billion contributed by Amazon, SoftBank, and Nvidia, which raised its valuation to $730 billion. Sora's abandonment reflects, in that context, a strategic decision to concentrate that enormous computing power on the most profitable business lines.
The use of Sora to create fake videos about Cuba
It is worth noting that Sora was identified as the AI behind false videos about Cuba circulated on social media, highlighting the potential -and the risks- of this technology for generating audiovisual content.
The most striking case of falsehood in the information was about the supposed death of Raúl Castro. It began on September 22 on the page Ignacio Giménez Cuba and was replicated by Periódico Patria 1892 without verifiable evidence. A parody account of CiberCuba amplified the misinformation with a graphic manipulation. The false hospitalization escalated to a supposed death that went viral.
This was just an example of how content could be used to manipulate public opinion and create false political narratives, as well as the importance of being informed through verified sources and cross-referencing information when disseminating news.
Goodbye to the Disney agreement
The closure of Sora has immediate consequences for a $1 billion deal between OpenAI and Disney.
That pact, signed on December 11, allowed users of Sora and ChatGPT Images to create content featuring over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, making the entertainment company a key client of OpenAI's programming interfaces for new products on Disney+. Now, the agreement is null and void.
A spokesperson for Disney stated that the company "respects OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and refocus its priorities on other areas," adding that it will continue "collaborating with AI platforms to find new ways to connect with fans wherever they are, responsibly adopting new technologies that respect intellectual property and the rights of creators."
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