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

Sora lasted less than one Quibi

OpenAI’s app joins the hallowed halls of video ideas that burned bright and fast.

3/25/26 12:23PM

Sora, we hardly knew ya. Yesterday, OpenAI announced that it will be shutting down its AI-generated text-to-video app, Sora.

Sora enjoyed a brief but intense moment of virality, juiced by its exclusive invitation-only early rollout. The app spent about three wild weeks as the No. 1 app in the iOS App Store during this invite-only period, but once everyone had access, interest started to drop.

With Sora shuttering, OpenAI’s app is added to the hallowed halls of short-lived video concepts like Quibi (Disney invested $25 million into that one), HQ Trivia, and Meta’s Lasso — a TikTok clone before Instagram Reels. Other examples, like the social audio app Clubhouse or the daily photo check-in app BeReal, have managed to survive in some form despite having lost much of their early hype.

When the app initially launched, users were quick to push it to generate some shocking videos. Dead celebrities like Robin Williams, Stephen Hawking, and Martin Luther King Jr. made frequent appearances in the early wave of videos.

Social media was flooded with user-generated videos featuring OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting on security camera footage, dressing up as a Nazi, and barbecuing Pikachu.

The number of recognizably copyrighted characters showing up in Sora videos was surprising, considering the bevy of lawsuits filed by content owners against AI companies like Midjourney. Hollywood was reportedly blindsided by OpenAI’s permissive rules around copyrighted characters, leading the company to roll out a plan allowing owners to opt their intellectual property out of appearing in Sora videos.

Sora’s launch led to an alternative to the “sue for an ungodly sum” model, when Disney and OpenAI announced a partnership in December of last year. The three-year agreement included a $1 billion Disney investment in OpenAI and would grant Sora users access to more than 200 animated Disney characters that they could prompt into doing, well, whatever.

As part of the deal, OpenAI reportedly wouldn’t pay a dime in cash for the licensing — an abnormal situation for the IP-obsessed entertainment juggernaut, but one that revealed a bit about where Disney saw the true value of the partnership (holding a piece of OpenAI).

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

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.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

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