OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has finally dished on Disney’s reaction to his decision to kill the company’s AI video generator app, Sora — scuttling a billion dollar deal the two giants had planned. 

Given the amount of money Disney was prepared to invest, and the suddenness of the decision, speculation abounded on the drama behind the scenes. But in an interview on the “Mostly Human” podcast — the first he’s given since the Sora news — Altman insists that emotions were cool.

When he broke the news to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, the first thing he told Altman was, “I get it,” Altman recalled.

“But it’s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work,” he said.

Both companies sound cagey about burning bridges. AI, bubble or not, is too buzzy a market to shut the door on one of the industry’s leading companies. And Disney’s cultural clout is too influential to ignore.

Altman, in the interview, left the door open to a future collab.

“I love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we’re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that,” Altman said. “But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies.”

Disney, in response to the Sora shutdown, responded in lukewarm fashion, underscoring its continued openness to AI tech.

“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 announced it was shuttering Sora in late March, something that reportedly came as a shock to Disney. Released only last September to considerable fanfare, it unleashed a storm of surreal AI creations like SpongeBob cooking meth, Altman grilling dead Pikachus, clips mocking dead celebrities, and spoof Pixar-style trailers featuring Jeffrey Epstein. 

And there was also the not-so-surreal: photorealistic depictions of people shoplifting, and other faked crimes, proliferated. The former raised significant concerns over potential copyright infringement, while the latter fueled discussions over the app being yet another source of effortless misinformation.

Disney lent Sora some credibility when in December it signed a deal with OpenAI to license hundreds of its iconic characters from franchises like Star Wars and Marvel to be used in the AI video generator — the first major licensing deal between OpenAI and a major Hollywood studio. The entertainment conglomerate also agreed to invest $1 billion into OpenAI and deploy its AI tech across the company.

Now, with the plug being pulled on Sora, that $1 billion investment will not be going ahead, and Disney is no longer set to be a major OpenAI customer. That’s a lot of money to be leaving on the table; Altman says he made the call to prioritize the precious computing power available to the company for other purposes. “It’s always about compute,” he said. Reporting, meanwhile, suggest OpenAI was losing a staggering $1 million per day on the video app.

Altman made a plea for sympathy.

“There are like many hard parts about being a CEO that you don’t get sympathy for,” he said in the podcast interview. “But one of them is, like, you have to, like, make a lot of, like, very tough resourcing calls and a lot of good things get caught up in that because they’re not the most important thing.”

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