OpenAI Enters Its Focus Era by Killing Sora

OpenAI said Tuesday it would discontinue Sora, its AI video app, roughly six months after launch. The company also said it would shutter the Sora API that allowed developers and Hollywood studios to access the text-to-video model.

The move shows how the ChatGPT-maker is trying to focus its efforts ahead of a planned IPO. OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, said in an interview with CNBC Tuesday that OpenAI needs to be “ready to be a public company.”

Since ChatGPT’s launch, CEO Sam Altman has run the company like Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator he used to lead, placing bets on a wide range of products. This includes Sora, as well as a browser, a family of hardware devices, robots, and Codex, its AI-powered coding agent.

These efforts have had varying levels of success, and Sora's growth in particular has stalled in recent months. After peaking at 3.3 million worldwide downloads across iOS and Android in November 2025, downloads of the Sora app fell to just 1.1 million by February 2026, according to the third-party analytics firm Appfigures.

Researchers at OpenAI have described the company’s culture over the last several years as “bottom-up,” meaning that the company allocates resources to promising ideas as they emerge, rather than following road maps from executives. While this has created fertile ground for AI research, it has also spread the company’s GPUs and employees thin, according to multiple sources.

Now, OpenAI’s leaders have given a stern mandate to refocus the company around a few key areas.

One of the focus areas is a “super app” that will combine ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas. OpenAI’s leaders hope that combining these products into a unified consumer interface will help the company turn ChatGPT into a true super assistant. (The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the super app and OpenAI’s efforts to simplify its offerings.)

Before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, it was planning to build an AI agent that could complete all sorts of digital tasks for people. This product, then dubbed the “super assistant,” was meant to bring the promise of AGI to life, but it has been harder to build than OpenAI expected, sources say. OpenAI has tried instead to launch agentic features inside ChatGPT, such as Operator and ChatGPT Agent, though adoption has been limited. The company is hoping a consumer agent built around Codex will resonate more with ChatGPT users.

OpenAI is also bolstering its enterprise business as it readies itself for the public market. While Anthropic was previously a front-runner in the AI coding race, OpenAI’s Codex team has caught up in the last year. Codex is now a bright spot for OpenAI, surpassing $1 billion in annualized revenue in January and continuing to grow.

While Sora launched with great fanfare, the product didn't quite fit into OpenAI’s new era, and the company decided its GPUs and researchers were better used elsewhere. In a statement to WIRED, an OpenAI spokesperson said, “As we focus and compute demand grows,” the Sora research team will work on “world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.”

The move seems to have blown up the company’s partnership with Disney, which had previously said it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI. Disney was reportedly blindsided by the decision, and the company said it no longer plans to invest.

There’s an open question around what OpenAI’s era of focus means for its research teams. OpenAI is competing with Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta for a small pool of top-tier talent. In January, OpenAI’s VP of Research, Jerry Tworek, left the company after struggling to get resources for his next big bet. While many employees appear energized by the company’s decision, others could decide to move to rival labs if their projects get deprioritized.