OpenAI has officially discontinued its Sora video generation platform due to unsustainable inference costs and a significant decline in user engagement following its September 2025 launch.

Key points

• OpenAI faced daily inference costs of approximately $15 million for Sora, while the product generated only $2.1 million in total lifetime revenue.
• Monthly downloads for the Sora app plummeted by 66% between November 2025 and February 2026, signaling a failure to retain an active user base.
• A planned $1 billion partnership with Disney, intended to integrate licensed characters into the platform, dissolved without any capital exchange following the shutdown.
• The company faced mounting legal and reputational risks, including lawsuits over branding and unauthorized deepfakes of public figures and copyrighted characters.
• OpenAI is reallocating its compute resources and research focus toward world simulation for robotics and enterprise-grade AI tools.

The shutdown highlights the widening gap between the high technical cost of generative AI and the economic reality of consumer-facing business models. By prioritizing enterprise applications and robotics, OpenAI is attempting to stabilize its unit economics ahead of a highly anticipated public offering.