OpenAI Enters Its Focus Era by Killing Sora

OpenAI announced it will discontinue its Sora AI video generation app and API, roughly six months after its high-profile launch. The decision reflects a strategic pivot as the company prepares for a public offering, with CFO Sarah Friar stating OpenAI needs to "be ready to be a public company." Sora's growth had stalled significantly, with worldwide downloads dropping from a peak of 3.3 million in November 2025 to just 1.1 million by February 2026, according to Appfigures. The shutdown has already torpedoed a major partnership, as Disney—reportedly blindsided by the move—has withdrawn plans for a $1 billion investment in OpenAI.

Internally, the shift marks the end of OpenAI's experimental "bottom-up" culture, where resources were allocated to promising ideas as they emerged. Leadership has now issued a mandate to concentrate GPUs and talent on core priorities. The primary focus is developing a consumer "super app" that unifies ChatGPT, the Codex coding agent, and the Atlas project into a single "super assistant" interface. Concurrently, OpenAI is strengthening its enterprise business, where Codex has become a revenue powerhouse, surpassing $1 billion in annualized revenue. The Sora research team will be redirected to "world simulation research" aimed at advancing robotics for physical tasks.