OpenAI Closes Sora: Skyrocketing Costs and Legal Battles

OpenAI Ends Sora: An Unexpected Shutdown

Less than a year after its launch, Sora, OpenAI's AI-powered social network, is set to disappear. OpenAI announced the closure of this platform on March 24, 2026. Despite a promising start, with nearly one million downloads and a spot among the most popular apps on the App Store, Sora failed to maintain its initial momentum.

Sora: An Ambitious Yet Limited Platform

Launched alongside the new generation of its video model, Sora 2, the platform offered much more than just a creation tool. It provided a complete social experience, allowing users to generate videos, publish them, share them, and explore others' content, much like traditional social networks. However, access to Sora was restricted to the United States, forcing international users to use a VPN to gain entry.

The interface of Sora resembled that of TikTok or Instagram, featuring an uninterrupted grid of videos. Although the videos were realistic, they were never entirely credible, often appearing too fast, too colorful, or incoherent, creating a sometimes unsettling experience on the big screen. This phenomenon is known as the "uncanny valley," theorized by Masahiro Mori, where discomfort arises when something resembles a human but fails to fully deceive.

The Threat of Misinformation

The videos produced by Sora competed with those from Gemini and its Veo 3 model. Despite typical AI imperfections, such as visual inconsistencies, overly rapid movements, or audio artifacts, the videos remained realistic. For an untrained audience, these flaws often went unnoticed, making the videos potentially misleading. OpenAI had integrated a watermark to indicate that the videos were AI-generated, an essential measure to limit abuse. However, internet users quickly found ways to remove this watermark, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between a real video and an artificial creation, thereby increasing the potential for manipulation, especially on social media where this content was widely shared.

The Economic Reasons Behind the Shutdown

In addition to misinformation issues, the operational costs of Sora were astronomical. Producing AI-generated videos requires colossal computing power. According to TechCrunch, Sora cost nearly one million dollars per day to operate, a pace that was difficult to sustain. In comparison, the revenue generated by the app was meager, bringing in only about $367,000 per month. Worse still, according to several experts, the platform reportedly incurred losses of up to $15 million per day.

Unlike ChatGPT, which found massive adoption in professional contexts, Sora remained an entertainment product, less profitable. Faced with these colossal financial losses, OpenAI had to make the difficult decision to shut down Sora.

Legal Battles and Increased Competition

In addition to economic challenges, Sora found itself at the center of numerous legal battles. By allowing the easy generation of videos inspired by existing works, Sora attracted the attention of rights holders. Companies and organizations worldwide condemned the unauthorized use of protected characters or universes. OpenAI had attempted to anticipate these tensions by signing an agreement with Disney, allowing the use of certain licenses. However, this agreement was the only one. Other major players, particularly in Japan, refused to follow suit. The organization CODA, which represents giants like Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, filed multiple complaints. Similar accusations emerged in Hollywood, plunging Sora into a genuine legal battleground.

Meanwhile, competition did not help matters. Google quickly regained the upper hand with its own content generation tools. In terms of video, the gap widened. Google's models, like Veo 3, offer longer, more structured, and better-controlled sequences. While Sora focused on short, highly stylized clips, the company provides videos capable of telling real stories, with a stronger narrative coherence.

By 2025, according to The Verge, the cost of generating Veo 3 had nearly halved, dropping from $0.75 to $0.40 per second. This significant reduction made AI video much more accessible and, importantly, scalable. Added to this were advancements from Gemini and new models like Nano Banana 2. These Google solutions, deemed more reliable and easier to master, helped divert attention.

By January, downloads of Sora had plummeted by 45%. In just a few weeks, OpenAI's platform went from one million users to fewer than 500,000. This sharp decline immediately impacted finances. Faced with this accumulation of difficulties, OpenAI chose to change its strategy and focus on tools that are more useful in everyday life, particularly for businesses and developers.