At the end of 2024, the company unveiled Sora, a text-to-video AI model that could generate moving images based on user prompts
OpenAI has announced that it’s “saying goodbye” to Sora, the social media platform that featured exclusively AI-generated videos.
“To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “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.”
The original Sora model was made available to ChatGPT Pro and ChatGPT Plus users in the U.S. and Canada back in December 2025 — introducing a text-to-video AI model that could generate moving images based on user prompts, ranging from stylistic animations to photorealistic “footage.” The following September, the company launched a standalone app offering users a TikTok-style social media feed with nothing but artificially generated content. Videos appeared in a user’s feed, and could liked and remixed by others on the platform.
The new app quickly became the most-downloaded in the iOS App Store’s Photo and Video category. As users were wowed by OpenAI‘s latest AI video generation model’s realistic images and physics, it ran into immediate problems with copyright infringement and deepfakes.
Then, the Walt Disney Co. announced in December that it had struck a three-year deal with OpenAI to bring its iconic characters to Sora — licensing more than 200 of its characters for use in AI video and agreeing to invest $1 billion in OpenAI.
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Disney’s investment with OpenAI has now been nixed, according to The Wall Street Journal. “As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokeswoman said.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Rolling Stone that while Sora will be discontinued in the consumer app and API, the Sora research team will continued to “focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.”
