According to an exclusive report by The Information, OpenAI is discussing a major plan to license Sora technology through an equity partnership to a new AI video startup, allowing the previously shut-down Sora to "come back to life."
The startup was co-founded by Sora's former research lead Bill Peebles, DreamWorks Animation co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, and former Dropbox CFO Sujay Jaswa. Under the plan being negotiated, OpenAI would, in exchange for receiving partial equity in the new company, grant it deep customization access to the underlying model beyond a standard API (the two sides are still negotiating core details such as model weights). This marks a complete shift in Sora's commercial positioning from a consumer-facing general-purpose generation product to a B2B ecosystem aimed at Hollywood and the professional film production market.
Previously, Sora went through dramatic strategic adjustments: released in February 2024 and launched in December, with Sora 2 rolled out in 2025, but due to high compute costs and OpenAI concentrating resources on core businesses such as ChatGPT, coding, and enterprise AI, Sora's web and app versions ceased operation on April 26, 2026, and the related API was shut down on September 24, even causing Disney's potential US$1 billion investment to fall through.
This asset-light revival plan allows OpenAI to activate its existing technology assets and share in future commercial returns without diverting resources from its core large-model business, while also exploring new possibilities for deploying AI video technology in professional vertical domains.