OpenAI announced on March 24, 2026, that it is discontinuing its Sora AI video generation app and related API, redirecting efforts toward business tools and robotics research. The decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, also unravels a $1 billion partnership with Disney. Company executives cited a need to avoid distractions from core productivity applications.
OpenAI posted on X from the @soraofficialapp account: 'We're saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.' A spokesperson told Engadget and CNET: 'We've decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API. As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.' The announcement followed a leaked all-hands meeting where Fidji Simo, OpenAI's head of applications, described consumer-facing projects like Sora as 'side quests' amid a pivot to enterprise tools such as coding and data analysis systems, spurred by releases like GPT-5.2. Sora, which previewed photorealistic video generation in February 2024 and launched publicly that December, had seen declining downloads, with a 32% drop in new U.S. installs from November to December 2025, according to Appfigures data. Competitors including ByteDance's SeeDance 2.0 and Google's Veo have advanced in the space. Disney, which invested $1 billion last year to feature its characters in Sora, is exiting the deal. A Disney spokesperson told CNET: 'As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere. We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms.'
