Tech
OpenAI’s Sora was the creepiest app on your phone — now it’s shutting down
OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down Sora, a TikTok-like social app that launched six months ago. OpenAI did not give a reason for the shut down, nor did it share information about when it will officially be discontinued.
When Sora first opened up as an invite-only social network, it seemed like everyone was clamoring for an invite. But like Meta’s Horizon Worlds — the company’s virtual reality social platform — which is also in turmoil despite once being central to the company’s infamous metaverse, Sora didn’t have real staying power. Though the underlying Sora 2 video- and audio-generation model is scarily impressive, there was not sustained interest in an AI-only social feed.
Sora was intended to function like an AI-first TikTok, cloning the recognizable vertical video feed interface. Its flagship feature, “cameos,” allowed people to scan their faces and make realistic deepfakes of themselves. These “cameos” could be made public, allowing anyone to make videos of their “cameo.” (Cameo took OpenAI to court over the name of this feature and prevailed, forcing the company to change it to “characters.”)
In a turn of events that surprised literally no one, this glorified deepfake app was weird as hell.
At launch, Sora felt like an under-moderated minefield of creepy Sam Altman videos. I will never be the same after watching a realistic clone of the OpenAI CEO walking through a slaughterhouse of fattened pigs and asking, “Are my piggies enjoying their slop?”
Sora was not supposed to allow people to generate videos of public figures who did not explicitly opt-in, but it was all too easy to evade OpenAI’s guardrails. Sure enough, deepfakes of real people like civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and actor Robin Williams emerged, prompting both of their daughters to go on Instagram and ask users to stop making videos of their deceased fathers.
After making dozens of videos in which Sam Altman steals Nvidia chips from a Target, users shifted gears. Instead, they intentionally made content using copyrighted characters, inviting legal trouble for the man they loved to deepfake — we saw Mario smoking weed, Naruto ordering Krabby Patties, and Pikachu doing ASMR.
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This didn’t unfold as planned. Rather than sue, Disney, a notoriously litigious company, gave OpenAI a $1 billion investment and a licensing deal that would have allowed Sora to generate videos featuring characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.
It looked like a landmark moment for the AI industry. But with Sora gone, so is the deal — though notably, it appears no money actually changed hands before it collapsed. (Disney offered some polite words about the whole thing on Tuesday, telling the Hollywood Reporter it would “continue to engage with AI platforms” going forward.)
The initial hype around Sora was real. The app peaked in November with about 3,332,200 downloads across the iOS App Store and Google Play, according to data from the mobile intelligence firm Appfigures. If the app continued to grow, then perhaps OpenAI would’ve kept it going, but that’s not what happened. By February, it declined to 1,128,700 downloads. That seems like a big number, until you remember that ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users.
In its lifetime, Appfigures estimates that Sora made about $2.1 million from in-app purchases, which allowed users to buy more video generation credits. It’s hard to imagine that the Sora app’s computing demands tipped the scales that much for a company that’s already operating at a huge loss, but the app was perhaps too much of a liability to keep around if it wasn’t even growing.
When OpenAI launched the Sora app, I prepared for a world in which we could have the tools to make deepfakes of each other at our fingertips. While I rarely make TikToks, I felt obligated to post a PSA that this scary tech was coming fast. It ended up getting over 300,000 views, which is not the norm for my often dormant TikTok account, but this news got a real reaction out of people. I never expected that it would only last six months.
But just because Sora is gone doesn’t mean the threat went with it. The Sora 2 model is still available — it’s just tucked behind the ChatGPT paywall. And OpenAI is hardly alone in making this technology so accessible. It’s only a matter of time before the next social AI video app hits the market, and we’re inundated with another tsunami of clips in which Snow White storms the Capitol.
Tech
Glean’s top line crosses $300M as AI budget cutting becomes its major selling point
Glean, a company often described as the Google for enterprise, said it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a three-fold increase from the $100 million milestone it reached just 15 months ago.
While many AI startups are growing at a blistering pace, Glean’s progress is particularly remarkable. After years of essentially being the only player in the category, the seven-year-old startup is accelerating its growth as tech giants enter the enterprise AI search market with rival products.
“The first four or five years of our existence, we had no competition,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told TechCrunch. “Given how important search is to make AI work in the enterprise, every single company in the world wants to be in this space.”
Tech heavyweights building Glean-like tools include Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Atlassian.
Jain maintains there’s value in being a first mover in the space, but that it’s also equally important to offer a better product.
What Glean does better than its competition, according to Jain, comes down to the deep understanding that its AI tools have of customers’ business needs. Glean’s AI achieves this knowledge — a concept captured by the new, popular term “context graph” — by connecting to and learning from enterprises’ internal software systems.
Jain claims that Glean’s context graph also helps enterprises cut AI computing costs.
“If you connect your AI to Glean, it gives you all the information that you need to do your work, and that results in AI consuming far fewer tokens compared to if you unleash AI onto your systems directly,” Jain said. That’s because with Glean, AI ends up performing fewer operations, he added.
At a time when many companies are blowing through their AI budgets, those token cost savings have become a major selling point for the company.
“One of the things you know our customers really like about Glean is the fact that we can reduce your AI bill significantly,” he said.
The company, which was last valued at $7.2 billion when it raised a $150 million Series F last June, offers various pricing structures to its customers, which include Databricks, Reddit, Pinterest, and Samsung.
According to Jain, Glean offers both a consumption-based model, where clients pay per use, and a hybrid model that combines a fixed monthly fee for active users with separate usage fees for model consumption.
Glean is definitely not the first company to do this, but it’s worth pointing out that the company’s $300 million milestone cannot be fully described as traditional ARR, because a consumption model by definition doesn’t have a strictly recurring component.
Pure consumption pricing models depend on fluctuating user activity rather than predictable subscription renewals, therefore a portion of Glean’s top line is more accurately described as an annualized revenue run rate.
Glean did not immediately respond to a request for comment; this post will be updated if the company replies.
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Tech
Final 24 hours to save up to $410 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket
This is it. The countdown is almost over. You now have until tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT to lock in Early Bird savings of up to $410 for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 before prices increase.
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Register now and join 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and innovators at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13–15 for three days packed with networking, startup discovery, and conversations shaping the future of tech. Bring a plus-one at 50%, or bring a group to get an up to 30% discount.
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Today is the last day to apply to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 returns October 13–15 to Moscone West in San Francisco — and applications to speak are open for just a few more hours.
We’re inviting founders, investors, operators, and technology experts to apply for a chance to take the stage at one of the most influential tech events of the year.
More than 10,000 startup and VC leaders will gather at Disrupt 2026 to explore what’s next in AI, scaling, fintech, infrastructure, robotics, and the future of innovation.
Applications close tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now to share your expertise and help shape the conversations defining the tech industry.
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