Sora

Sora was OpenAI's text-to-video generation model, publicly previewed in February 2024 and launched to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in December 2024. It could generate up to 60-second video clips from text prompts with high visual Fidelity, and was widely cited as the most capable publicly available video generation model at launch. It was priced as a premium ChatGPT feature rather than an API product, which limited professional integration. OpenAI shut Sora down on 26 April 2026, less than 18 months after its public launch, reallocating compute resources and the research team toward robotics development.

Sora's shutdown is the defining cautionary episode in the media-AI-pivot story. Disney had announced a $1 billion OpenAI equity stake premised partly on Sora-based production access, offering animated access to 200+ Disney characters in exchange. OpenAI discontinued Sora before the deal closed and with no contract provision covering product discontinuation; Sam Altman told Bloomberg he 'felt terrible' delivering the news. Disney walked away and subsequently turned to Runway as its primary AI video substrate.

By June 2026, Netflix confirmed it had used Runway for a VFX sequence in The Eternaut, making Runway the studio-preferred open-vendor alternative Sora never became. The shutdown illustrates the structural platform risk of building long-cycle creative workflows on closed-source products from a single vendor: OpenAI's compute reallocation to robotics was not an assessment of Sora's market success but a unilateral internal priority shift. For the media industry, the episode is the primary data point against vendor lock-in in AI production tooling, and it accelerated Runway's commercial trajectory -- adding $40m in quarterly ARR and reaching a $5.3 billion valuation by the time of its Series E disclosure.