OpenAI Enters Its Focus Era by Killing Sora
As the ChatGPT-maker eyes an IPO, it's ditching Sora in favor of a unified AI assistant and enterprise coding tools.
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.
