March 24 (Reuters) – OpenAI is discontinuing its video generation tool Sora, the company said on Tuesday, in a surprise move by the ChatGPT maker as it sharpens its focus on enterprise offerings ahead of a potential market debut later this year.
“We’re saying goodbye to Sora… we know this news is disappointing,” the Sora team said in a post on social media platform X, adding that timelines for the app and API, as well as details on preserving user work, would be shared later.
The announcement comes just a day after OpenAI published a blog post about Sora safety standards.
With the discontinuation of Sora, OpenAI will also wind down its partnership with Disney that was announced in December. A spokesperson for Disney said that the media giant respects “OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere.”
As part of the three-year agreement, Disney was set to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and was allowing the AI startup to use characters from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel franchises in Sora.
A team at Disney was working with OpenAI’s Sora team last night when the entertainment giant learned its partner was “pivoting strategy,” according to a source familiar with the matter.
OpenAI first introduced Sora in early 2024, stunning the world with a software that could generate feature film-like quality videos based on text prompts. The launch prompted AI companies across the U.S. as well as China ramp up releases of their own AI video generation models.
The company launched the standalone Sora app in September 2025, letting users create and share AI videos that can be spun from copyrighted content and shared to social media-like streams.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the discontinuation of Sora earlier on Tuesday, said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff saying the company would wind down products that use its video models.
In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and will not support video functionality inside ChatGPT either, the report added.
The move comes as OpenAI faces intensifying pressure to ramp up its enterprise and coding products, as competition from rival AI startups and tech giants heats up.
Anthropic’s focus on training its models on coding has helped its Claude Code product gain strong traction among developers, giving the company an edge over rivals like OpenAI in the enterprise AI market.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru, Juby Babu in Mexico City, Dawn Chmielewski and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles, Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)
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