OpenAI Killed Sora. $15M a Day, $2M in Revenue, 6 Months of Life.

Mar 28, 2026 · #ai #openai #sora #disney #ai video #aitu

On March 24th, OpenAI announced it’s shutting down Sora - their AI video generation app that lasted exactly six months. The $1 billion Disney deal? Dead too.

Film camera - video production

Sounds like clickbait? Unfortunately, no. The numbers are brutal.

The money that never came back

Forbes reported that Sora was costing OpenAI roughly $15 million per day in inference costs. Per day. Let that sink in.

On the revenue side - Appfigures, a mobile analytics firm, estimates total lifetime revenue from in-app purchases at $2.1 million. Not monthly. Total. For the entire existence of the app.

Bill Peebles, who led the Sora project at OpenAI, publicly admitted:

“The economics are completely unsustainable.”

Hard to argue with that when you’re spending $15 million a day and earning $2 million over six months.

Downloads weren’t great either. Sora peaked at around 3.3 million downloads in November 2025. By February 2026 it dropped to just over 1.1 million - a 66% decline in three months. For context, ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users. Sora was never even close.

Disney’s billion-dollar exit

In December 2025, Disney announced a three-year licensing deal with OpenAI. Over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars were supposed to be available for video generation in Sora. Disney also planned to invest $1 billion in OpenAI.

According to Hollywood Reporter and Variety, the money never changed hands. Disney put out a statement saying it “respects OpenAI’s decision” and will “continue to engage with AI platforms.” Diplomatic, but clear - they’re moving on.

Here’s the irony. The Disney deal was partly a response to what Sora users were already doing illegally - generating Mario smoking weed, Pikachu doing ASMR, Naruto ordering Krabby Patties. Instead of suing, Disney tried to legalize it and profit from it. That plan just collapsed.

Deepfakes and family pleas

The controversies went beyond animated characters. Users generated realistic deepfakes of real people - including Martin Luther King Jr. and Robin Williams. Both of their daughters publicly asked people to stop making videos of their deceased fathers.

TechCrunch didn’t mince words - they called Sora “the creepiest app on your phone” in the headline about its shutdown. The Characters feature (originally called Cameos until Cameo won a lawsuit over the name) let users scan faces and create realistic videos of anyone. Safety guardrails existed but were easy to bypass.

What OpenAI is doing next

The compute resources from Sora are being redirected to robotics. OpenAI also teased a new model called Spud - Sam Altman promised it would “really accelerate the economy” but gave zero details.

This is all happening ahead of a planned IPO. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s head of applications, told staff in an all-hands meeting that the company is cutting “side quests” to focus on “productivity on the business front.” Sora was apparently one of those side quests.

What this means for AI video

I’ll be direct about what I think.

If these numbers hold up - and they come from sources that have been reliable so far - Sora might be the first serious signal that consumer-grade AI video generation is simply too expensive right now. At least in a model where users pay a few dollars for credits while inference costs are astronomical.

This doesn’t mean AI video is dead. Runway, Kling AI, Pika Labs, Luma Dream Machine - they’re all still running. Google’s Veo is in the game. But none of them have publicly shown a business model that works. And OpenAI - the company with arguably the most resources in the industry - just admitted theirs didn’t.

The question nobody has answered yet: is this a Sora problem, or an AI video problem?

This is part of AITU #02 - a weekly roundup of the biggest AI and tech news. The full episode covering 7 stories from March 20-27, 2026 drops Tuesday, April 1st on my YouTube channel.