OpenAI’s decision last week Sora’s suspension of its AI-powered video creation tool just six months after it was released to the public immediately drew skepticism. The app invited users to upload their faces – was this some kind of sophisticated data capture? According to the new WSJ investigationthe real explanation is much more boring: Sora was a money pit that no one was using, and keeping it alive was costing OpenAI’s AI race.
So what happened? After the hard launch, Sora’s worldwide user base peaked at around one million and then dropped to less than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was taking in about $1 million a day — not because people loved it, but because the video was too expensive to make. Each user who plunged into the fantasy scene drew a limited supply of AI chips.
While the entire team within OpenAI focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over software engineers and revenue-generating enterprises. Claude Code in particular was eating OpenAI’s lunch.
So CEO Sam Altman made the call: Kill Sora, free up computing, and refocus. If you want to understand how sudden this is, consider what happened with Disney, according to the WSJ: the entertainment giant committed $1 billion to the partnership, but Sora learned of the closing less than an hour before going public. The deal died with him.
