Sam Altman Opens Up About Sora Shutdown and Scrapping Disney's Billion-Dollar AI Partnership

Sam Altman Breaks Silence on Sora Shutdown

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has finally addressed the abrupt shutdown of Sora, the company's AI video generator, in his first interview since the controversial decision terminated a billion-dollar deal with Disney. Speaking with journalist Laurie Segall on the Mostly Human podcast, Altman revealed that when he called Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro to break the news, the first response he received was simply "I get it."1

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The conversation, which also involved former Disney CEO Bob Iger who spearheaded the partnership, remained cordial despite the massive financial implications.3

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OpenAI disclosed on March 24 that it would discontinue the video generation app, launched in late 2024, with Disney receiving less than an hour's notice before the public announcement.2

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"It's super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work," Altman acknowledged.1

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High Operational Costs and Scarce Computing Resources Drive Decision

The shutdown came as Sora was hemorrhaging money, burning through approximately $1 million per day while its user base plummeted from one million to fewer than 500,000 users.2

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Altman framed the decision around prioritizing increasingly scarce computing resources for next generation projects. "It's always about compute," he explained, adding that OpenAI has "a few times in our history realized something really important is working or about to work so well that we have to stop a bunch of other projects."3

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The OpenAI CEO revealed that the company had debated alternative approaches, including folding Sora into ChatGPT to focus on generation and creativity. However, he noted that succeeding with the product as conceptualized would have required implementing engagement features designed to keep users watching videos—a path that "would have put a series of incentives on us, and would have led to a bunch of decisions to win that we just didn't want to make."3

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This decision followed a jury verdict finding Meta and YouTube liable for creating harmful features that contributed to user addiction, awarding $6 million in damages.2

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Disney Partnership and Licensing Deal Collapse

The December announcement of the Disney partnership represented the first major licensing deal between OpenAI and a major Hollywood studio.1

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The agreement would have provided users licensed access to over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars franchises, with Disney investing $1 billion into OpenAI and deploying its AI technology across the entertainment conglomerate.1

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With the Sora shutdown, that $1 billion investment will not proceed, and Disney is no longer positioned to become a major OpenAI customer.1

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Despite the setback, both companies appear cautious about burning bridges. Disney responded in measured tones: "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."1

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Altman similarly left the door open, stating, "I love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we're working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that."1

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Strategic Pivot Toward Enterprise Customers and Robotics

Altman confirmed that OpenAI rejected an internal proposal to integrate Sora's features into the ChatGPT platform, emphasizing that the closure aligns with the company's strategic pivot toward coding tools and enterprise customers.2

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The research team from Sora will transition to developing world simulation models aimed at advancing robotics.2

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This mirrors a previous strategic shift when OpenAI shut down multiple working projects, including robotics, to concentrate compute and researchers on GPT-3.3

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"We need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies," Altman explained.1

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The Sora app will be taken offline on April 26, with the developer API scheduled for shutdown on September 24.2

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Altman made a plea for understanding the difficult trade-offs: "There are like many hard parts about being a CEO that you don't get sympathy for. But one of them is, like, you have to, like, make a lot of, like, very tough resourcing calls and a lot of good things get caught up in that because they're not the most important thing."1

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The shutdown also addresses concerns over copyright infringement and misinformation that plagued the platform since its September release, which saw users create controversial content ranging from photorealistic depictions of shoplifting to spoof trailers featuring problematic figures.1

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