In an abrupt announcement on Tuesday, OpenAI said it was “saying goodbye” to its AI video generator Sora. The move comes just six months after the company’s splashy launch of a stand-alone app where people could make and share hyper-realistic AI videos in a scrolling social feed.

“To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you,” the company wrote in a post on X. “What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.”

OpenAI first made Sora publicly available in late 2024, but it wasn’t until the company launched Sora 2 and its stand-alone app last September that the video generator reached mainstream attention. Just days after release, it quickly took the No 1 spot at the top of Apple’s app store. People created all sorts of absurd short videos, such as Diana, Princess of Wales doing parkour and dogs driving cars. But the video generator also received criticism for violent and racist videos, as well as the use of copyrighted characters, deepfakes and misinformation.

OpenAI gave no indication it was working to wind down Sora. In a blogpost on Monday titled “Creating with Sora safely”, the company outlined ways it’s been working to make the app safer for teens and with stricter guardrails against harmful content, such as sexual material, terrorist propaganda and self-harm promotion.

The shuttering of the video generator comes just three months after OpenAI and Disney signed a three-year deal that would allow Sora users to create videos from more than 200 licensed Disney characters, including those from Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. A spokesperson from the Walt Disney Company told the Guardian in a written statement that the studio would now be ending its partnership with OpenAI.

“As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” the spokesperson said.

“We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”

OpenAI said it would soon share more about its timeline for shutting down Sora, along with information on how people can save videos they’ve made.