OpenAI enters the Focus Era by killing Sora

OpenAI said Tuesday You will stop Soraan AI-powered video app, has been released nearly six months after its 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 maker of ChatGPT is trying to focus its efforts ahead of its planned IPO. Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, said in an interview with CNBC Tuesday that OpenAI should be “ready to be a public company.”

Since launching ChatGPT, CEO Sam Altman has run the company like Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator he led, betting on a wide range of products. This includes Sora, as well as A browserfamily of Devices, Robotsand Codex Alimentariusan AI-powered coding agent.

These efforts have had varying levels of success, and Sora’s growth in particular has stalled in recent months. After peaking at 3.3 million downloads worldwide across iOS and Android in November 2025, Sora app downloads 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 several years as “bottom-up,” meaning that the company allocates resources to promising ideas as they emerge, rather than following roadmaps from executives. While this has created fertile ground for AI research, it has also led to the proliferation of company and employee GPUs, according to multiple sources.

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

One area of ​​focus is a “super application” that will combine ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas. OpenAI leaders hope that integrating these products into a unified user interface will help the company turn ChatGPT into a true super assistant. (The Wall Street Journal previously reported Super app and OpenAI’s efforts to simplify its offerings.)

Before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, it was planning to build an AI agent that could complete all kinds of digital tasks for people. The product, then dubbed the “super assistant,” was intended to bring the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to reality, but building it was more difficult than OpenAI expected, sources say. OpenAI has instead tried to release proxy features within ChatGPT, such as Operator and ChatGPT Agent Adoption was limited. The company hopes that a consumer agent built on Codex will resonate more with ChatGPT users.

OpenAI is also strengthening its enterprise business as it prepares for the public market. While Anthropic was previously at the forefront of the AI ​​programming race, The Codex team at OpenAI has caught up Last year. Codex is now a bright spot for OpenAI, as its annual revenue surpassed $1 billion in January and continues to grow.

While Sora launched to great fanfare, the product didn’t quite fit into the new era of OpenAI, and the company decided its GPUs and researchers were better used elsewhere. In a statement to WIRED, an OpenAI spokesperson said: “As we focus and calculate growing demand, the Sora research team will work on “global simulation research to develop robots that will help people solve real-world physical tasks.”

The move appears to have torpedoed the company’s partnership with Disney, which previously said it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI. It was reportedly Disney He was surprised by the decisionThe company said it no longer plans to invest.

There’s an open question about what OpenAI’s focus era means for its research teams. OpenAI competes with Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta for a small pool of high-level talent. In January, OpenAI’s vice president of research, Jerry Turek, subsequently left the company He struggles to get the resources for his next big bet. While many employees appear enthusiastic about the company’s decision, others may decide to move to competing labs if their project priorities are demoted.