• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

It makes sense for OpenAI to focus on products and tools that will matter most to investors as the company prepares to go through an initial public offering.

After all, how can OpenAI CEO Sam Altman justify losing adoption, momentum and revenue on a platform that once looked like a breakout hit and then quickly faded?

OpenAI released Sora, an AI-based short form video app, just weeks after Google released Veo. Although it generated an early spike in use, it never became a habit for consumers.  

Sensor Tower data shows Sora reached peak downloads in October 2025 -- at about 5 million downloads -- and then steadily declined.

By December it was down monthly by 47%, and in January 2026 it declined by 36%. App downloads declined in February by 31% and 25% by March.

Monthly active users for Sora peaked in December 2025 at around 6 million, and declined by March 2026 to 5 million.

OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo earlier this month held an all-hands-on-deck meeting with employees. Simo said the company is “orienting aggressively” toward high-productivity use cases. One media outlet confirmed that OpenAI could debut on the public markets as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.

Reports suggest Sora became too expensive to operate, estimating the annual run rate at more than $5 billion. Others thought the decision revolved around deepfake and copyright concerns. Still others pointed to prioritizing its IPO shift.

While the stand-alone technology that turned text into videos closed, the underlying technology is likely to still be used in other ways such as moving the video technology inside ChatGPT.

Rather than abandoning video generation entirely, the company is pivoting toward robotics and advanced world simulation. 

OpenAI will likely use the creator tool to train large language models that simulate reality, but a fully open Sora app created risk for advertisers. People used it to create deepfakes of celebrities, and it was also used to create misleading or non-compliant ads and user-generated content that brands could not control.

Sora became a shiny object without safeguards. That is something a public company cannot have in its portfolio of products.