OpenAI is out of the video business. Not reorganizing it. Not folding it into ChatGPT. Out. The Sora app is dead, the API is dead, and video generation inside ChatGPT is being removed. Disney's $1 billion deal, announced in December, built on the promise that Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars fan content would run on Sora, is being unwound.
We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. 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.
— Sora (@soraofficialapp) March 24, 2026
We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on…
Disney's official statement says they "respect OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business." That's a carefully worded sentence describing a $1 billion collapse in six months.
The Sora research team is being redirected to robotics. Sam Altman told staff on Tuesday.
The numbers explain why. Total consumer revenue from Sora across iOS and Android since its September launch: $1.4 million. Peak month was $540,000. Against $14 billion in projected 2026 losses, which is a liability. Every video generation job consumed GPU compute that could have been used for inference with ChatGPT or Codex. OpenAI's own head of Sora had already announced generation limits because chips couldn't keep up with demand. The math wasn't close.
Meanwhile, Anthropic hit $19 billion in annualized revenue by early 2026, no video, no image generation, no consumer social experiments, no Disney deal. One product surface: chat, code, and computer use in a single interface. OpenAI saw where every dollar of market growth was actually coming from, and it wasn't fan videos of Iron Man.
The pivot is explicit. ChatGPT, Codex, and the browser are merging into one app. Instant Checkout, another consumer product, was also killed this week. Every experiment that wasn't coding or enterprise is being cut. What's left looks like the Anthropic playbook: focused surface area, developer and enterprise priority, no sprawl.
The competitive beneficiary here is Google. Veo already lives inside Gemini with no standalone app to manage and no separate brand to maintain. Among the major AI labs, Google is now the only one with a functioning, actively supported video generation product at scale. Runway, Kling, Luma, and the other independents are still shipping — but none of them have Google's distribution or compute infrastructure. The AI video market just reorganized around one dominant player by default.
For Disney, this is a strange story. The company put $1 billion in stock warrants on a product category that lasted six months in the market. The licensed content pipeline, characters, and IP from some of the most valuable entertainment brands in the world, generating fan video on Sora, never produced a single video. Their legal team is now cleaning up a deal that was supposed to define the future of AI-assisted storytelling.
The broader signal isn't that video AI failed. It's that OpenAI tried to build a media company and a developer platform at the same time and couldn't sustain both. Anthropic never tried.
The exit left the field to others. Four months later, Chinese AI video startup AIsphere closed a $439 million Series C extension led by Alibaba at a valuation above $2 billion, in a category OpenAI walked away from.
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