AI image of Sam Altman grilling Pikachu (@shlms/Sora)

OpenAI’s Altman: Sora will let copyright holders control how their characters appear

The buzzy AI video generation app is tweaking its lax controls for generating copyrighted characters in users’ videos.

10/6/25 1:07PM

Updated 10/6/25 4:05PM

OpenAI is moving fast and breaking things. Its new invite-only generative-AI video app, Sora, spent the weekend at the top of the App Store charts, letting users generate videos of copyrighted characters in situations that would make a brand manager blush.

Sora was released into the world with few controls to prevent people from violating intellectual property rights, using a novel opt-out mechanism for media companies. Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has announced some changes that will give IP owners control over how their characters could appear in Sora videos (or not at all).

“We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of ‘interactive fan fiction’ and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all).”

The service is not cheap to run. At today’s OpenAI DevDay keynote, Altman announced Sora 2 API access, which gives a first glimpse of the cost of generating the videos. The “sora-2-pro” model, which is used for the Sora app, costs developers $0.30 per second, which works out to $3 for each of Sora’s 10-second videos.

Altman seems interested in figuring out how to monetize all this:

“We are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users.”

That sounds good, but what revenue? The app is free and has no ads, and it remains to be seen if people would stick around for endless AI slop of Sam Altman barbecuing Pikachu or cringe-rapping.

Bill Peebles, the head of Sora at OpenAI, posted on X that new controls are available today for users to manage the context in which their “cameos” appear in other users’ videos.

sora update: cameo and safety improvements inbound!

1. cameo restrictions: we've heard from lots of folks who want to make their cameos available to everyone but retain control over how they're used.

starting today, you can now give instructions to sora that restrict the type…
— Bill Peebles (@billpeeb) October 5, 2025

An example of the new controls shared by an OpenAI staffer shows a preference panel that lets a user say that they must always appear wearing a hat that says “#1 Ketchup Fan” and never appear in videos with mustard or relish.

UPDATE (October 6, 4 p.m. ET): Added details around the cost for generating Sora videos.

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Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

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Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5