OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool shuts down tomorrow. The web and app experiences will be discontinued on April 26, with the API remaining available for developers until September 24, according to OpenAI’s help center. Users who want to keep their content have been told to export data before the deadline, with no guarantee of a post-shutdown export window.
Sora peaked at roughly one million users before declining to fewer than 500,000, while burning approximately $1 million per day in compute costs, The Next Web reported. The Motion Picture Association had flagged intellectual property infringement on the platform. Any purchased ChatGPT/Sora credits can still be applied to Codex, according to OpenAI.
Three Exits in One Day
The shutdown triggered a cascade of senior departures. On April 17, three executives announced they were leaving: Kevin Weil, the former chief product officer who had been leading OpenAI for Science; Bill Peebles, the researcher who built Sora; and Srinivas Narayanan, the chief technology officer of enterprise applications, TechCrunch reported.
Weil, who joined from Instagram two years ago, had moved from the CPO role to lead OpenAI for Science, the team behind GPT-Rosalind. That initiative is now being absorbed into other research groups. Peebles credited Sora with igniting “a huge amount of investment in video across the industry” and argued that exploratory research needs space away from the company’s mainline roadmap. Narayanan, who spent three years helping ship ChatGPT and the API while growing the applied engineering team from roughly 40 people, said he was leaving to spend time with family, according to TechCrunch.
The “Side Quest” Purge
OpenAI leadership has framed the cuts as elimination of “side quests,” projects that distract from the company’s core focus on GPT scaling, agentic AI, and enterprise productivity. Sora is the highest-profile casualty, but OpenAI for Science has also been dismantled as an independent unit.
The departures add to a leadership attrition pattern that has left only two of OpenAI’s 11 co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, still at the company. At least 12 senior executives departed in 2025 alone. Former talent has dispersed to Anthropic, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, Google DeepMind, and startups, The Next Web reported.
The Agentic Bet
The consolidation around enterprise AI is not abstract. OpenAI recently launched workspace agents in ChatGPT, committed over $20 billion to Cerebras for inference compute, and is building what it calls a “superapp” combining ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas into a single enterprise platform. The company is generating roughly $25 billion in annualized revenue against projected $14 billion in losses, according to The Next Web.
The message from leadership is clear: every dollar and every team that does not directly contribute to the agentic enterprise roadmap is being cut. Sora’s compute costs alone would fund a substantial portion of a product team. The question is whether a company that systematically eliminates its exploratory research can sustain the kind of breakthroughs that made it dominant in the first place. As Peebles wrote on his way out: “Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term.”