Inside the Shutdown of Sora: Daily Losses of $1 Million, Disney Informed Less Than an Hour Before Closure

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, a deep investigation by the WSJ reveals the behind-the-scenes details of OpenAI’s shutdown of Sora. Sources indicate that Sora was losing approximately $1 million per day. After launching in September last year, the global user peak reached about 1 million, but has since declined to less than 500,000 (according to Similarweb data). The video model requires an understanding of the complete motion world, and the training costs are significantly higher than those of language models. OpenAI’s internal researchers discovered through a resource allocation dashboard that the Sora team received an unexpectedly low amount of chip resources, and the product was neither profitable nor capable of enhancing language model capabilities. The decision to shut down was extremely rushed. Many Disney executives learned of the announcement less than an hour before it was made, while pilot programs for the enterprise version of Sora were already underway, with Disney originally planning to officially launch it as early as this spring. In an internal letter, Altman expressed encouragement regarding employees’ willingness to make ‘difficult trade-offs.’ Disney’s new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, is currently in discussions with over a dozen partners for alternative solutions. Last spring, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally reached out to Sora’s lead researcher, Bill Peebles, in an attempt to poach him, prompting OpenAI to offer a raise to retain him and subsequently expand his responsibilities within Sora. In early 2025, Altman also invited former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to serve as an informal advisor for an internal social media project similar to X. From daily losses of $1 million to a hasty shutdown, Sora has become OpenAI’s most expensive strategic misstep in its attempt to reshape popular culture with AI.