TechCrunch/WSJ: Why OpenAI Really Killed Sora — $1M/Day Burn While Claude Code Was 'Eating Their Lunch'

TechCrunch·high signal

A March 29 TechCrunch deep dive based on a WSJ investigation reveals Sora's user count peaked at ~1 million then collapsed to under 500K while burning $1M/day in compute. The decisive factor: while an entire OpenAI team propped up Sora, Anthropic's Claude Code was winning the engineers and enterprises that actually drive revenue. Disney had committed $1B to the partnership but was informed about the shutdown less than one hour before the public announcement.