Sora Incident Revealed: Daily Loss of One Million Dollars, User Assets Frozen, Disney Notified Less Than an Hour Before Shutdown

According to 1M AI News's monitoring, a WSJ in-depth investigation revealed the behind-the-scenes details of OpenAI's shutdown of Sora. Insider sources disclosed that Sora was losing approximately $1 million per day. Since its launch in September last year, it had a peak global user base of around 1 million, which has since dropped to below 500,000 (Similarweb data). The video model required a full understanding of the physical world, and the training cost far exceeded that of a language model. OpenAI's internal researchers discovered through a computing resource allocation dashboard that the Sora team had unexpectedly high chip resource allocation. However, the product was neither profitable nor capable of enhancing language model capabilities.

The decision to shut down was extremely rushed. Many Disney executives were informed less than an hour before the announcement. At that time, a pilot of the enterprise version of the Sora tool was already underway, and Disney had originally planned to officially launch it as early as this spring. In an internal memo, Altman expressed encouragement for employees willing to make "tough choices." Disney's newly appointed CEO, Josh D'Amaro, is currently in talks with over a dozen partners to explore alternative solutions.

Last spring, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally reached out to Sora's lead researcher, Bill Peebles, in an attempt to poach him. OpenAI retained Peebles through a salary increase and subsequently expanded his role at Sora. In early 2025, Altman also invited former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to serve as an informal advisor for an internal social media project similar to X within the company. From million-dollar daily losses to a rushed shutdown, Sora became the most costly strategic misstep on OpenAI's path to reshaping popular culture with AI.