In a surprise announcement Tuesday, OpenAI said it is “saying goodbye” to its AI video generator Sora. The move comes just six months after the company announced with much fanfare a standalone app that lets people create and share hyper-realistic AI videos in their scrolling social feeds.
“Thank you to everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built a community around it. We know this news is disappointing, because what you created with Sora was important,” the company said in a post to X.
OpenAI first made Sora publicly available in late 2024, but the video generator only gained mainstream attention when the company released Sora 2 and its standalone app last September. Just a few days after its release, it quickly grabbed the number one spot at the top of Apple’s app store. People made all kinds of absurd short videos, like Princess Diana doing parkour and dogs driving cars. However, the video generator came under fire for its use of copyrighted characters, deepfakes, and misinformation, as well as violent and racist videos.
“Sora has quietly been a content moderation nightmare,” said Alon Yamin, CEO of Copyleaks, which has been investigating problematic content on the platform. But Sola’s departure will not end misinformation, he warned: “Harmful deepfakes and manipulated media will only migrate to platforms that are more opaque and difficult to audit.”
OpenAI showed no signs of working to quell Sora. In a blog post on Monday titled “Create safely with Sora,” the company outlined how it has been working to make the app safer for teens and strengthen guardrails against harmful content such as sexual material, terrorist propaganda and promotion of self-harm.
The closure of the video generator comes just three months after OpenAI and Disney signed a three-year agreement that allows Sora users to create videos from more than 200 licensed Disney characters, including characters from Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. A Walt Disney Company spokesperson told the Guardian in a written statement that the studio is ending its partnership with OpenAI.
“As the nascent field of AI progresses rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and shift its priorities to other areas,” a spokesperson said.
“We are grateful for the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with our AI platform to find new ways to meet our fans where they are, while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect intellectual property and creator rights.”
OpenAI said it will soon share more details about the timeline for Sora’s closure and information on how to preserve videos people create.
