Good morning. OpenAI is shutting down the Sora app, and Disney has reportedly cancelled a planned $1 billion deal with the company that would have allowed Sora to generate videos featuring Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.
Also: Figma just opened its canvas to AI agents, allowing tools like Cursor and Claude to design directly inside your files, starting today in open beta.
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In today's issue:
OpenAI shut down the Sora video app as Disney canceled its deal.
Figma opened its canvas to AI agents with a new MCP tool.
Omma (from the Spline team) lets you build 3D sites and apps with AI.
Framer launched Shaders for stunning animated website effects.
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TOP STORY
💀 OpenAI shuts down "Sora"
OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its standalone AI video app, just six months after launch. The Sora team posted a farewell on Tuesday:
"We're saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We'll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.
Sora's story starts in February 2024, when OpenAI dropped a preview of its text-to-video model that genuinely shocked the internet.
OpenAI released the first public version in December 2024, then launched a standalone app in September 2025 — positioned as an AI-first TikTok, where every video in the feed was generated by users and AI.
It became the #1 app in the App Store's Photo & Video category within a single day, and hit 1 million downloads in under five days. At its peak in November, it had 3.3 million monthly downloads.
But the hype didn't hold. By February, downloads had fallen to 1.1 million, and the app had generated only around $2.1 million in total in-app purchases over its entire lifetime. For a company burning through compute at OpenAI's scale, that math didn't work.
Deepfakes of public figures spread quickly, including videos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robin Williams that prompted their daughters to publicly ask people to stop.
Users also generated clips of copyrighted characters (Mario, Naruto, Pikachu) at will, creating ongoing legal exposure.
Despite all that IP chaos, Disney (one of the most litigious companies in Hollywood when it comes to protecting its characters) surprised everyone in December by inking a blockbuster three-year deal with OpenAI.
Rather than sue, they chose to partner: Sora would let users generate fan videos using 200+ characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars, with curated clips heading to Disney+.
Disney had planned to invest $1 billion in OpenAI as part of the agreement. That deal never closed, and Disney has now walked away entirely.
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WEB DESIGN
🤖 Figma opens the canvas to "AI Agents"
Figma just launched a new MCP tool called “use_figma” that lets AI agents design directly on your canvas.
This allows AI tools Cursor and Claude to actually place, edit, and build inside your Figma files without you copy-pasting between apps.
Open beta starts today.
Directing AI agents to create and update Figma files and components via the use_figma tool.
Prompt: “Recreate this in the Figma canvas using my Figma components to build this out.”
What's an MCP tool? MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard that lets AI assistants like Claude or Cursor connect to and control other apps. Think of it like giving your AI a direct line into a piece of software (instead of just chatting, it can actually do things inside the app).
Figma also released a library of "skills" you can teach your agents to help them understand how to work with your components and design system.
For designers who've wanted AI to do more than write captions or generate copy, this is it. You can now describe what you want and watch an agent prototype it directly on the canvas.
DESIGN
🔥 Spline launches "Omma"
The makers of Spline, the popular browser-based 3D design tool used by hundreds of thousands of designers, just launched something new: Omma, an AI agent platform for building 3D experiences, websites, and apps.
Omma combines three things in one place:
Code generation (via LLMs)
3D AI mesh generation
Image generation
You can go from a prompt to a fully deployed project, including custom domains, without leaving the platform.
A few things that make it interesting:
Generate multiple versions of something in parallel, compare them, and pick your favorite to keep building from.
Remix and create variants of content shared by other users in the community.
Export to CSV, JSON, GLB/GLTF, and more (so your work isn't locked in).
WEB DESIGN
🖼 Framer launches "Shaders"
Framer just dropped Shaders, a new set of visual effects you can drag straight into any website project — think beautifully animated gradients, image effects, and particle animations that look polished and load fast.
Each shader functions as a standalone tool within the Insert Panel. Drop it in, tweak the settings, and it's live.
Plus, they’re giving away a $50 Framer Store gift card for the best shader 👇
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📰 Other news you might've missed
Epic Games announced layoffs of over 1,000 employees.
Spotify announced SongDNA beta, letting premium users explore a song's collaborators, samples, interpolations, and every cover it inspired.
Miro acquired Reforge, the professional development platform for product and growth teams.
OpenAI rolled out an upgraded shopping experience in ChatGPT, with richer visuals and better product coverage.
Shopify brands are now shoppable directly inside ChatGPT.
Google Ads added Veo to Asset Studio, letting advertisers turn product images into videos for Google and YouTube campaigns.
Snapchat launched AI Clips, a new lens format that turns still photos into five-second AI-generated videos.
Notion shipped Presentation Mode, allowing you to open any page, press Present, and it becomes a deck.
Notion AI Meeting Notes shipped 30+ improvements, including a recording indicator that uses 15x less memory and is smaller and more responsive.
Lovable added AI-powered penetration testing for apps built on its platform, scanning for OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, privilege escalation, and data exposure.
Cursor can now create new Figma components and frontends using your team's existing design system.
Paper launched Snapshot, a tool that lets you paste your live website directly into Paper as editable layers (no screenshots needed, it reads real HTML/CSS).
Webflow launched the Visual Developer Certification to validate your ability to ship production-grade, accessible, SEO-optimized websites.
Filmora is unlocking all creative assets (titles, transitions, effects) for free until March 31 as part of an Easter Sale.
Restream removed a step from dual streaming in Studio.
Freepik launched Relight, a browser-based lighting studio for images and videos, allowing you to adjust the direction, intensity, and color of lighting, or transfer lighting from a reference photo.
Mirage raised $75M as it enters its next chapter, accelerating global expansion while pushing the frontier of agentic video creation.
Artlist added video-to-video generation to its creative platform.
beehiiv launched an MCP server that lets AI tools connect directly to your newsletter data and workflows.
Higgsfield launches Chat, a built-in social network with text, audio, and video chat for collaborative AI video creation.
