OpenAI's Sora burned a million dollars a day while losing half its users in record time

Sora cost around one million dollars per day to operate.

Usage fell rapidly: the app grew to about one million users then dropped to around 500,000.

OpenAI canceled training runs for new video models and redirected compute to coding, enterprise, and agent-based AI.

Competitive pressure from Anthropic contributed to the pivot; the Sora team shifted to world models for robotics.

The Sora app shut down in April and the Sora API followed in September.