OpenAI Kills Sora After $1M/Day Burn Rate, Pivots All Compute to Enterprise Coding — Disney $1B Deal Collapses

OpenAI announced the shutdown of Sora, its AI video generation app, on March 24, 2026 — just six months after public launch. The app will go dark on April 26, 2026, with the API following on September 24, 2026.

FINANCIAL REALITY: According to WSJ investigation published March 29, Sora was burning approximately $1 million per day in compute costs. Total revenue generated was only $2.1 million. User count peaked at around 1 million before collapsing to fewer than 500,000.

DISNEY DEAL COLLAPSE: Disney had committed $1 billion to a Sora partnership for AI-generated content with Disney characters. Per WSJ, Disney found out about the shutdown less than 30 minutes before the public announcement — a meeting on Sora roadmap was happening just 30 minutes before. The deal died instantly.

STRATEGIC PIVOT TO CODING AND ENTERPRISE: The real driver was competitive pressure. While an entire OpenAI team was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over software engineers and enterprises. Claude Code specifically was cited as eating OpenAI lunch in the developer tools space. CEO Sam Altman made the call: kill Sora, free up compute, and refocus on coding tools and enterprise products ahead of a potential IPO.

OpenAI is now building a super app merging ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas browser into a single desktop application. Sora technology will continue as a research project focused on world models for robotics.