OpenAI’s Sora shutdown is a warning to Chinese AI video rivals, not the market opening it appears, says Bloomberg’s Catherine Thorbecke

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Catherine Thorbecke argues that OpenAI's decision to shut down Sora, which was burning roughly $1 million a day in compute costs, should worry Chinese AI video rivals like Kling, Vidu, and ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 rather than encourage them, as it signals that AI video generation is too expensive to work as a consumer social media product. Thorbecke writes that Chinese firms should follow the economics toward enterprise customers like advertisers and professional content creators rather than chasing viral consumer content, and that with Sora gone, global regulatory scrutiny over copyright infringement and deepfake abuses will fall more squarely on Chinese competitors expanding abroad. ByteDance holds a major distribution advantage by folding Seedance into CapCut, which had 741 million monthly active users in March compared to Kling's 7.3 million, but Thorbecke cautions that none of these firms have built a durable moat and will now compete more fiercely with each other.