OpenAI Sora App Shuts Down April 26 — Disney Deal Unravels, Users Urged to Export Data Now

OpenAI·medium signal

OpenAI's Sora video generation app will be discontinued on April 26 (this week), with the API following on September 24. The product peaked at ~1 million users before collapsing to under 500,000 while costing approximately $1M/day to operate, unraveling a planned $1B Disney partnership. Former Sora head has departed alongside OpenAI's product chief and enterprise CTO. For builders, this is a cautionary signal: even well-funded AI products can fail fast when compute costs outpace user retention, and building on third-party AI platforms carries shutdown risk.