The Daily Seal

Sora AI’s Shutdown Explained
Tobin Waters, Daily Seal Student Writer

What happened?

OpenAi has announced that their popular video creating app Sora will be shutting down its services, effective April 26th, 2026, yesterday.

Why did they do this?

OpenAi CEO Sam Altman made this decision because Sora simply cost too much money and time, and therefore was no longer a smart investment for the business. Sora costs around 1 million dollars per day for OpenAi to run it because of how costly video generation can be, and because of the plummeting user count, they weren’t making any money (not to mention the amount of employees constantly working on Sora to fix and improve it). During this time, Anthropic (Owners of Claude AI) had been advancing their systems even more. So, OpenAI made the decision to shut down Sora and pivot to keep working on their AI Assistant systems. 

How did people react?

After word had gotten out Sora was shutting down, people started having meltdowns on social media, posting AI images online featuring people burning down the OpenAI headquarters as a sign of their anger. Videos have also started going viral on Sora featuring people showing their anger towards OpenAI for this decision and their sadness for the shutdown. It is likely Sora will never return, but many people have already started begging for it to come back. OpenAI has also lost unrecoverable amounts of reputation with Disney, as Disney put in a $1B investment into Sora, and it obviously didn’t work out for them.

What will happen next?

Since Sora was one of the biggest AI video generators, people who rely on Sora’s free video generation will have to try to find a different video generator who can do the same job. There are other AI video generators, but they will likely have a different style, which could cause them to lose money in some cases (Ex. a fan of an AI channel notices the videos look different and they do not like it. If this happens in large amounts, the AI channel will lose money due to all their fans leaving). Other effects could be seeing less AI generated videos (Or “AI slop”) all over social media, which many people have been very happy about.

Image credits:

https://slate.com/technology/2026/03/ai-openai-sam-altman-disney-sora-shutdown.html?pay=1776526311678&support_journalism=please 
https://aigptjournal.com/news-ai/sora-app-shutdown-creators/