ChatGPT Creator Abruptly Shuts Down App, Here's the Reason
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - Last week, OpenAI surprisingly announced the closure of the Sora app. This ‘sibling’ of ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) application for creating video content, or termed a ‘video-generation tool’.
Sora once shook the technology industry when it was first launched about six months ago. OpenAI did not disclose detailed reasons for the closure, nor the exact schedule when the app would no longer operate.
According to a Wall Street Journal investigative report, the real reason for shutting down Sora is related to its business potential. Sora requires substantial funds to continue operating, but it has few users.
If OpenAI were to maintain Sora, the costs incurred would be enormous and hinder the company’s ambitions to continue dominating the race in the AI sector, quoted from Tech Crunch on Monday (30/3/2026), based on the WSJ report.
For information, Sora was once a widely used app. At its peak, the app had around one million users. However, the app was gradually abandoned, and its users did not reach 500,000 people.
On the other hand, the app continuously ‘burned money’, around US$1 million (Rp17 billion) per day. This is because video-generation capabilities require significant costs to continuously gather data and process content.
While the entire team at OpenAI focused on making Sora function, Anthropic quietly won over software engineers and companies, thereby boosting revenue. Claude Code, in particular, eroded OpenAI’s market share.
As a result, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had to make a tough decision to halt Sora, free up computational power, and refocus on core services. Unfortunately, the decision taken by Altman was very abrupt and created a shock.
According to WSJ, Disney had committed US$1 billion (Rp17 trillion) for a partnership with Sora. However, the entertainment giant only learned that Sora would be discontinued less than one hour before the partnership was announced to the public. The deal ultimately fell through.