OpenAI Shuts Down Sora Video App, Scraps Disney Deal

OpenAI told employees Tuesday it will discontinue its Sora consumer video app, including the iOS app, API and Sora.com experience, as part of a move to conserve scarce compute and refocus on enterprise products and its next major AI model family, codenamed "Spud." The company said Sora’s research team will keep working on "world simulation" for robotics, but the short‑form social video product itself is being wound down, ending an effort that briefly topped Apple’s App Store charts before downloads plunged. As part of the retrenchment, OpenAI is terminating a previously announced deal under which Disney would have licensed more than 200 characters for Sora and invested $1 billion in the company; a source told Axios no money ever changed hands, while Disney issued a statement saying it will keep exploring AI partnerships that respect intellectual property and creators’ rights. Oversight of safety work is being shifted from CEO Sam Altman to Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, with President Greg Brockman taking over security, so Altman can focus on raising capital and securing data centers and chips amid intense competition from Anthropic and Google. The decision underscores how severe AI compute constraints and investor pressure are forcing even top players to kill flashy consumer experiments and reallocate resources to infrastructure, frontier models and enterprise contracts.