Sora shutdown内幕：Daily losses of millions of dollars, user base halved, only an hour before Disney's shutdown was announced

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, a deep investigation by the WSJ has revealed the behind-the-scenes details of OpenAI’s shutdown of Sora. Sources indicate that Sora was losing about $1 million per day. After launching in September last year, it reached a global user peak of about 1 million, but has since continuously declined to less than 500,000 (according to Similarweb data). The video model requires an understanding of the entire motion world, and the training costs are far higher than those of language models. OpenAI’s internal researchers discovered through a computing power allocation dashboard that the amount of chip resources allocated to the Sora team was unexpected, and the product was neither profitable nor able to enhance the capabilities of the language model.

The shutdown decision was extremely hasty. Many Disney executives learned about it less than an hour before the announcement, while a pilot of the enterprise version of the Sora tool was already underway, with Disney originally planning to officially launch it as early as this spring. Altman expressed in an internal letter that he was encouraged by the employees’ willingness to make “difficult trade-offs.” Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro is currently negotiating alternative solutions with more than a dozen partners.

Last spring, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approached Sora’s lead researcher Bill Peebles in an attempt to poach him. OpenAI retained him by offering a salary increase and subsequently expanded his responsibilities within Sora. In early 2025, Altman also invited former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to serve as an informal advisor for an internal social media project similar to X. From losing a million dollars a day to a hasty shutdown, Sora became OpenAI’s most expensive strategic misstep in its attempt to reshape pop culture with AI.