Sit with that Disney number. Two hundred characters licensed, including Mickey, Darth Vader, and Iron Man. A billion dollars committed. And someone at OpenAI decided the appropriate notice window was less than sixty minutes. That's how you treat a mailing list subscriber. Disney had just handed them the keys to the most valuable IP library on earth.
The competitive pressure made the speed make sense, at least internally. Anthropic's Claude Code had been steadily winning enterprise developers, and OpenAI chose to redirect compute toward defending the business that actually generates its reported $25 billion in annualized revenue. Internal language about eliminating "side quests" has a distinctly pre-IPO flavor, especially with SoftBank's $40 billion bridge loan maturing next March.
Sora wasn't alone in the purge. Experimental API endpoints, earlier fine-tuning offerings, ChatGPT plugins all got curtailed or killed this month. Developers who'd built on these capabilities got minimal warning. OpenAI's planned "Adult Mode" for ChatGPT? Shelved indefinitely.
Sora.com goes dark April 26. The API follows in September. The team stays on as a research unit focused on world simulation for robotics.
Sobering moment for the AI video space broadly. ByteDance reportedly delayed Seedance 2.0 around the same time. Generating video remains orders of magnitude more expensive than text, and nobody has figured out how to make users pay enough to cover it. The economics never got going in the first place.
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