OpenAI recently shut down its video-generation tool, Sora, just six months after launching it to the public. Many wondered if this was a data grab, but an investigation reveals a more mundane reason: the app was too expensive to run and wasn’t being used.
Sora initially attracted one million users, but that number plummeted to fewer than 500,000 as the cost of running the tool became unsustainable. The app burned through $1 million daily due to its high computational demands. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s similar technology was gaining traction with software engineers and enterprises.
To cut costs, CEO Sam Altman made the decision to shut down Sora and redirect resources elsewhere. This move came as a surprise to Disney, which had invested $1 billion in the partnership, only to have it canceled less than an hour before the public announcement.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/29/why-openai-really-shut-down-sora