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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company abruptly shuttered its Sora video platform to focus on its “compute and our product capacity,” acknowledging that in the process he scuttled a landmark partnership with Disney which had agreed to invest $1 billion in the AI video generation tool.
“I love Sora, I love generating videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we’re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that. But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies,” Altman said on the inaugural Mostly Human podcast with journalist Laurie Segall.
“We have a few times in our history realized something really important is working or about to work so well that we have to stop a bunch of other projects,” he added.
Disney and Sora announced the landmark agreement in December, marking the most significant collaboration between a Hollywood studio and an AI company to date. “Technological innovation has continually shaped the evolution of entertainment, bringing with it new ways to create and share great stories with the world,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said then.
Did you call Bob Iger and tell him personally” asked Segall.
“Of course, yeah,” Altman said.
Disney Parks & Experiences head Josh D’Amaro took the reins from Iger as chief executive on March 18. Altman pulled the plug on Sora March 24.
“Disney is an amazing company all around and the very first thing that the new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro said to me, I felt terrible … was like, “Hey, you know, I get it.”
“It’s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work. And there are many hard parts about being a CEO that you don’t get sympathy for understandably, but one of them is [making] very tough resourcing calls and a lot of good things get caught up in that, because they’re not the most important thing.”
More to come
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https://deadline.com/2026/04/sam-altman-open-ai-disney-sora-1236772254/
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Almontather Rassoul
