OpenAI Shuts Down Sora AI Video, Disney Drops Planned $1B Investment

OpenAI said it will discontinue Sora, the generative-AI video creation platform it launched in late 2024, without providing a reason for the decision.

“We’re saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing,” OpenAI’s Sora team said in a statement Tuesday.

The statement added, “We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.” OpenAI didn’t respond to requests for additional info.

The announcement comes just three months after Disney inked a groundbreaking deal with OpenAI. Under the three-year licensing agreement, Sora would have been able to generate user-prompted videos from a set of more than 200 masked, animated or creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. Sora and ChatGPT Images were to generate “fan-inspired” videos with Disney’s licensed characters in early 2026 — with Disney+ adding a curated selections of Sora-generated videos.

Disney has now ended its partnership with OpenAI, which included plans for the media conglomerate to take a $1 billion stake in the artificial-intelligence company led by CEO Sam Altman.

A Disney rep said in a statement to Variety: “As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere. We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”

The second iteration of OpenAI’s Sora, which launched in late September 2025, generated stunningly realistic-looking videos — and raised alarms in Hollywood given the Sora 2 opt-out model requiring IP owners to proactively flag that they wanted their copyrighted works excluded from the system. In November, Japanese content trade group CODA, whose members include animation house Studio Ghibli, issued a letter to OpenAI demanding the AI company stop using their content to train Sora 2.

OpenAI had provided a preview of Sora, which uses a text-to-video model, in February 2024 before releasing the first public version of it in December of that year.

“Turn your ideas into videos with hyperreal motion and sound,” OpenAI’s Sora page says. “Cast yourself and your friends in videos as characters.”

Other generative-AI video platforms remain in service — some of which Disney and other Hollywood studios have accused of copyright infringement.

Shortly before it announced the pact with OpenAI, Disney sent Google a cease-and-desist demand, alleging the internet giant was engaging in copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and videos. (Google subsequently removed AI-generated videos of intellectual property identified by Disney.)

That came after Disney had earlier in 2025 sent cease-and-desist letters to Meta and Character.AI, as well as lawsuits Disney filed together with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery against AI companies Midjourney and Minimax alleging copyright infringement.

More recently, China’s ByteDance incurred a spate of legal threats from studios including Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., Sony and Netflix with its Seedance 2.0 AI system. In response, ByteDance promised to implement additional safeguards “as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users.”