Did Sora 2 have a lot of users or not? Because OpenAI was choosing between two, still bad options:

- The service had a ton of users, and they’d be very upset that it got shut down. or…

- The service had very few users, implying a ton of the coverage from 2025 was pure hype.

Neither is a good look! Based on later reporting, it was the latter: it appears that they had 500K active users. Not great.

But it was still excessively expensive. So it was both unpopular and a cost center.