OpenAI AI Updates: March 30, 2026

1. WSJ Investigation Reveals Sora Burned $1M Per Day Before Shutdown

OpenAI shut down Sora after the AI video generator peaked at roughly 1 million users globally then collapsed to fewer than 500,000, all while consuming approximately $1 million per day in inference costs. A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Disney’s $1 billion partnership deal fell apart when the studio was notified less than an hour before the public announcement, and that OpenAI has redirected Sora’s compute budget toward a new model codenamed “Spud” that finished pretraining on March 25. Source

2. OpenAI Shelves “Adult Mode” Alongside Sora

OpenAI also indefinitely shelved its “Adult Mode” project, internally referred to as “Spicy ChatGPT,” which would have allowed explicit content generation. The company cited unresolved challenges with sexual datasets and the difficulty of reliably filtering illegal content as the primary reasons for pulling the feature, marking the second major product cancellation in a single month. Source