Disney Ends $1 Billion OpenAI Partnership After Sora Shuts Down
OpenAI is bidding goodbye to Sora as the tech giant revealed on Tuesday that it would shut the video platform down.
“We’re saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing,” the official Sora X account said in a statement. “We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.”
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately return TheWrap’s request for comment.
Sora, which first launched in 2024, had over 1 million downloads in less than five days and would release an updated version at the end of September. But the text-to-video model quickly raised copyright concerns in Hollywood, prompting pushback from the Motion Picture Association, unions like SAG-AFTRA and A-list stars like Bryan Cranston, among others.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman would later update Sora’s copyright controls and offer monetization in the app for creators to help address Hollywood’s concerns.
The move comes after OpenAI struck a $1 billion deal with Disney in December, to bring more than 200 of its characters to the platform to create short videos for social media, as well as use for ChatGPT’s image-generation platform.
Under the agreement, Disney was also set to host a series of curated Sora-generated videos on Disney+, while OpenAI would help power new experiences on the streaming service. Disney employees were also set to have access to ChatGPT.
Following the news about Sora, the partnership between Disney and OpenAI will come to an end.
“As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement. “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.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that Sora shutting down is part of OpenAI’s effort to redirect computing resources and top talent to productivity tools for enterprise and individual users. Last week, the company said it would combine the ChatGPT desktop app, coding tool Codex and browser into a super app.
It also comes on the heels of OpenAI announcing a $110 billion investment at a $730 billion pre-money valuation last month, which includes $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia and $50 billion from Amazon.
The Journal notes that OpenAI could consider a potential initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.
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