OpenAI’s ‘Art Washing’ Sora App is Dead; Deal With Disney Scrapped
1March 27, 2026
OpenAI, the company behindChatGPT, has elected to shut down theAItext-to-video generatorSorajust months after its official app launch in September. BeforeSorahad even officially been disseminated to the public, in 2024, artists and creatives who were given access to the beta version were quick to reject the technology, penning an open letter in which they condemned Sora’s “art washing” and leaking the app’s source code.
“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company,” the letter read.
Sora pressed on with trying to court the art world: in February of 2025, the app announced the advent of the Global Sora Artist Program, an initiative that enlisted ten artists and creative teams to use Sora to generate short films that could help tout the technology’s uses. OpenAI invested $3 million in the project. Related US Supreme Court Declines Appeal Hearing For Case On Copyrighting AI Artwork The Paradigm of Possibility: Rem Koolhaas Remembers Frank Gehry
But Sora, which allowed people to create realistic-looking AI videos of public figures, has been riddled with problems since its inception. Last October, OpenAI blocked Sora users from generating deepfake images of Martin Luther King, Jr. after complaints about “disrespectful depictions” of King on the app came from the civil rights leader’s estate.
Now, everything has ultimately been scrapped, including a planned $1 billion investment in OpenAI from Disney.
“As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.
In recent months, OpenAI has begun to reorient its core operations in order to minimize “side quests” like Sora, instead narrowing in on serving businesses and coding.