OpenAI recently announced that Sora AI, an AI video generator, would be shut down on April 26. This shutdown will include the app and web version of the video generator. Along with the shutdown of Sora, you will not be able to generate videos on ChatGPT either.

Sora was only released six months ago, in late September of 2025, though ChatGPT Plus users could use it before public release in late 2024. Every video came with a watermark to prevent Sora from being misused. Quickly after release, there were plenty of third-party programs used to remove the watermark.

During December of 2025, Disney invested $1 billion into OpenAI’s video generator, allowing users of Sora to generate copyrighted characters from Disney. On March 24, when Sora’s shutdown was announced, the deal was cancelled and their $1 billion was pulled out, further cementing the fact that Sora is not coming back.

The question is, why was Sora really cancelled? Six months in public use is quite a short amount of time, especially for such a popular app like Sora, and the cancellation seemed to come out of nowhere.

In short, Sora was eating up money. The video generator was losing OpenAI cash, and lots of it. It cost much more to generate the videos than users were paying for them: nothing. Sora’s videos were mostly free to generate, the only cost being for better quality “pro” videos. Along with not making much, Sora didn’t have nearly as many active users as it did at its launch. No users, no cost, no revenue. It was only a matter of time.

Artificial intelligence is expensive to run, and uses a lot of resources. OpenAI was losing lots of money from Sora due to high costs and limited resources. Despite this, many users didn’t expect the shutdown, using it religiously up until the announcement of the shutdown.

Recently, there has been a TikTok account that has blown up in popularity, becoming the fastest growing account on the app. This account posted a series of AI generated videos called Fruit Love Island, a parody of the show Love Island, but instead with artificially generated fruit characters.

Fruit Love Island has stirred up some controversy, many users hating it and wanting it to be banned- which succeeded. Before the removal of many of the videos, the creator of Fruit Love Island made many posts complaining about how hard it was to make, and about the shutdown of Sora. 

Some are happy about OpenAI’s shutdown of Sora, while others are upset. Some may never have heard of it, and some may use it frequently. No matter what side you’re on, Sora was losing too much money for OpenAI to not shut it down.