OpenAI has officially announced the shutdown of its application Sora, the AI-based tool for video creation.
Through a post published on the platform X, the development team wanted to thank the creators and the vast community that had formed around the software, promising to provide soon further details on the final timelines and on how users can save the works already created.
It is certainly an unexpected closure for one of the most viral and discussed products of the recent period.
Farewell Sora, OpenAI closes the video generation app
After an initial debut around the end of 2024, the service’s real success exploded in September 2025, in conjunction with the launch of the standalone app and the release of Sora 2.
Since then, the software had registered millions of downloads, flooding social networks with countless artificially generated videos.
Although the company has not yet provided explicit motivations behind this drastic decision, analyses strongly point toward the huge operating costs. Running a large-scale video generation system requires impressive computing resources.
According to a report published by Forbes in November 2025, the daily operating costs of OpenAI to generate clips were around $15 million, a figure that, projected on an annual basis, would exceed the $5 billion mark.
This reading is echoed in the words of Bill Peebles, head of the Sora project, who already in October of the same year had publicly admitted how the product’s economic structure was entirely unsustainable.
The extremely high public usage rate has indeed produced a disproportionate volume of very short videos with little intrinsic value, unable to justify the exorbitant costs of the servers needed to process them.
Disney’s withdrawal and IPO ambitions
The end of the application is not seen as an isolated event. Parallelly, the entertainment giant Disney has confirmed the withdrawal of an investment estimated at one billion dollars, tied precisely to OpenAI’s ambitions in the video sector.
The deal would have allowed creating content by leveraging Disney’s intellectual properties, with the prospect of bringing these productions to the Disney+ platform.
A spokesperson for the film studio told The Hollywood Reporter that they respect the decision of the tech company to abandon this specific business to focus on other priorities.
However, these moves appear closely linked to broader financial logic. Rumors suggest an imminent initial public offering (IPO) for OpenAI.
To present to investors with a solid and reassuring balance sheet, eliminating a source of uncontrolled spending such as the Sora application represents a necessary move to optimize corporate efficiency.
A new home within ChatGPT
Although Disney’s statements suggest a definitive withdrawal from the video generation sector, the reality points to a different direction. The Sora technology will not disappear, but will be absorbed into ChatGPT.
The indirect confirmation has recently arrived from the analysis of the Android app’s code, where text strings were found that explicitly refer to an integration of the video engine.
This choice fits into a clear consolidation strategy: by closing the dedicated app, the company reduces the costs of a separate infrastructure and pushes users toward a single interface.
ChatGPT is thus preparing to become an all-encompassing application, centralizing textual, visual, and video tools under one roof, while maintaining a much stricter control over computing costs.
