OpenAI said on Tuesday would result in the discontinuation of the AI-powered video app Sora, approximately six months after launch. The company also said it would shut down the Sora API, which allowed developers and Hollywood studios to access the text-to-video model.
The move shows how the developer of ChatGPT is trying to focus its efforts ahead of its planned public offering. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in an interview: CNBC on 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 led, placing bets on a wide range of products. This includes Sora, as well as the browser, a family of hardware devices, robots, and Codex, an AI-powered coding agent.
These efforts have met with varying degrees of success, and in recent months, Sora’s development in particular has stalled. After peaking at 3.3 million global downloads on iOS and Android in November 2025, Sora app downloads dropped to just 1.1 million in February 2026, according to independent analytics firm Appfigures.
OpenAI researchers have described the company’s culture over the past few years as “bottom-up,” meaning that the company allocates resources to promising ideas as they emerge, rather than being guided by action plans presented by executives. While this created fertile ground for artificial intelligence research, according to many sources, it also spread the company’s GPUs and employees.
Now, OpenAI leaders have issued a strict mandate to focus the company on several key areas.
One area of focus is a “super app” that will combine ChatGPT, Codex and Atlas. OpenAI leaders hope that combining these products into a unified consumer interface will lend a hand the company transform ChatGPT into a true super assistant. (The Wall Street Journal previously reported on great application and OpenAI’s efforts to simplify its offerings.)
Before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, it planned to build an AI agent that could perform all kinds of digital tasks for humans. The product, then called a “super assistant,” was intended to bring AGI’s promise to life, but it proved more complex to build than OpenAI expected, sources said. Instead, OpenAI attempted to run agent-based features in ChatGPT such as ChatGPT Operator and Agent, although their adoption was confined. The company hopes that a consumer agent built around the Code will appeal more to ChatGPT users.
OpenAI is also strengthening its corporate operations as it prepares for the public market. While Anthropic was previously at the forefront of the AI coding race, the OpenAI Codex team caught up last year. Codex is currently a radiant spot for OpenAI, surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue in January and growing steadily.
Although Sora launched with great fanfare, the product didn’t quite fit into the recent era of OpenAI and the company decided that its GPUs and researchers would be better used elsewhere. In a statement to WIRED, an OpenAI spokesperson said: “As focus and demand for computation increases,” Sora’s research team will work on “worldwide simulation research to advance robotics that help humans solve real-world physical tasks.”
The move appears to have blown 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 stated that it no longer plans to invest.
It remains an open question what OpenAI’s era of focus means for its research teams. OpenAI competes with Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta for a miniature pool of top-notch talent. In January, OpenAI’s vice president of research, Jerry Tworek, left the company after struggling to secure funding for its next large bet. While many employees seem excited by the company’s decision, others may decide to transfer to competing labs if their projects become deprioritized.