OpenAI enters its focus period by killing Sora

OpenAI said on Tuesday it would stop soraits AI video app, about six months after launch. The company also said it would shut down 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 CFO Sarah Friar said in an interview with CNBC Tuesday that OpenAI “must 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 browsera family of hardware devices, robotsand Codexits AI-powered coding agent.

These efforts have had varying degrees of success, and Sora’s growth in particular has stalled in recent months. After peaking at 3.3 million worldwide downloads for iOS and Android in November 2025, downloads of the Sora app fell to just 1.1 million by February 2026, according to third-party analytics firm Appfigures.

Researchers at OpenAI have described the company’s culture over the past few years as “bottom-up,” meaning the company allocates resources to promising ideas as they emerge, rather than following roadmaps from executives. While that created fertile ground for AI research, it also spread the company’s GPUs and employees thinly, according to multiple sources.

Now, OpenAI’s leaders have given a strict mandate to refocus the company on a few key areas.

One of the focus areas is a “super app” that will combine ChatGPT, Codex and Atlas. OpenAI’s leaders hope that combining these products into a unified consumer interface will help the company transform ChatGPT into a true super assistant. (The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the super app and OpenAI’s efforts to simplify its offerings.)

Before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, it was planned to build an AI agent that could complete all kinds of digital tasks for humans. This product, then called the “super assistant,” was intended to bring the promise of AGI to life, but it was more difficult to build than OpenAI expected, sources say. Instead, OpenAI tried to launch agentic features within ChatGPT, such as Operator and ChatGPT Agent adoption is limited. The company hopes that a consumer agent built around Codex will appeal more to ChatGPT users.

OpenAI is also strengthening its enterprise business as it prepares for the public market. While Anthropic was previously a frontrunner in the AI ​​coding race, OpenAI’s Codex team caught up in the past year. Codex is now a bright spot for OpenAI, which surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue in January and is still growing.

While Sora launched with great fanfare, the product didn’t quite fit into OpenAI’s new era, and the company decided that its GPUs and researchers were better used elsewhere. In a statement to WIRED, an OpenAI spokesperson said, “As our focus and computational demand grows,” the Sora research team will work on “world simulation research to advance robotics that will help humans solve real-world physical tasks.”

The move appeared to blow up the company’s partnership with Disney, which previously said it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI. Apparently Disney was blinded by the decisionand the company said it no longer plans to invest.

There is an open question about what OpenAI’s era of focus means for its research teams. OpenAI is competing with Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta for a small pool of top talent. In January, OpenAI’s VP of Research, Jerry Tworek, subsequently left the company struggling to find resources for his next big bet. While many employees seem encouraged by the company’s decision, others may decide to move to competing labs if their projects are deprioritized.