OpenAI said Monday it’s releasing its buzzy AI video-generation tool, Sora, later in the day.

The AI video-generation model works similarly to OpenAI’s image-generation AI tool, DALL-E: A user types out a desired scene, and Sora will return a high-definition video clip. Sora can also generate video clips inspired by still images and extend existing videos or fill in missing frames. The Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup, which burst into the mainstream last year thanks to the viral popularity of ChatGPT, introduced Sora in February.

It’ll debut to U.S. users as well as to “most countries internationally” later today, according to OpenAI’s YouTube livestream, and the company has “no timeline” yet for launching the tool in Europe and the U.K., as well as some other countries.

OpenAI said users don’t need to pay extra for the tool, which will be included in existing ChatGPT accounts such as Plus and Pro. Employees on the livestream and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated features like “Blend” (i.e., joining two scenes together at the user’s direction), as well as the option to make an AI-generated video endlessly repeat.

Until now, Sora has mainly been available to a small group of safety testers, or “red-teamers,” who test the model for vulnerabilities in areas such as misinformation and bias.

Reddit users asked OpenAI executives in October about Sora’s release date, questioning whether it was being delayed “due to the amount of compute/time required for inference or due to safety.” In response, OpenAI’s product chief Kevin Weil wrote, “Need to perfect the model, need to get safety/impersonation/other things right, and need to scale compute!”

“We obviously have a big target on our back as OpenAI,” Rohan Sahai, OpenAI’s Sora product lead, said on the livestream, adding that the company needs to prevent illegal use of the technology. “But we also want to balance that with creative expression.”

OpenAI closed its latest funding round in October at a valuation of $157 billion, including the $6.6 billion the company raised from an extensive roster of investment firms and Big Tech companies. It also received a $4 billion revolving line of credit, bringing its total liquidity to more than $10 billion.

It’s all part of a serious growth plan for OpenAI, as the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup battles Amazon-backed Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon for the biggest slice of the generative AI market, which is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Earlier this month, OpenAI hired its first chief marketing officer, indicating plans to spend more on marketing to grow its user base. And in October, OpenAI debuted a search feature within ChatGPT that positions it to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Perplexity and may attract more users who otherwise visited those sites to search the web.

With Sora, the ChatGPT maker is looking to compete with video-generation AI tools from companies such as Meta and Google, which announced Lumiere in January. Similar AI tools are available from other startups, such as Stability AI’s Stable Video Diffusion. Amazon has also released Create with Alexa, a model that specializes in generating prompt-based short-form animated children’s content.

Video could be the next frontier for generative AI now that chatbots and image generators have made their way into the consumer and business world. While the creative opportunities will excite some AI enthusiasts, the new technologies present serious misinformation concerns as major political elections occur across the globe. The number of AI-generated deepfakes created has increased 900% year over year, according to data from Clarity, a machine learning firm.

OpenAI has made multimodality — the combining of text, image and video generation — a prominent goal in its effort to offer a broader suite of AI models.

News of Sora’s release follows protestors’ decision to leak what appeared to be a copy of Sora over concerns about the ChatGPT maker’s treatment of artists.

Some members of OpenAI’s early access program for Sora, which it said included about 300 artists, published an open letter in late November critiquing OpenAI for not being sufficiently open or supporting the arts beyond marketing.

“Dear corporate AI overlords,” the protestors’ open letter stated, “We received access to Sora with the promise to be early testers, red teamers and creative partners. However, we believe instead we are being lured into ‘art washing’ to tell the world that Sora is a useful tool for artists.”

The letter added that hundreds of artists provided unpaid labor for OpenAI through bug testing and feedback on Sora, and that “while hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.”

“We are not against the use of AI technology as a tool for the arts (if we were, we probably wouldn’t have been invited to this program),” the open letter stated. “What we don’t agree with is how this artist program has been rolled out and how the tool is shaping up ahead of a possible public release. We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts.”

In late November, an OpenAI spokesperson responded to the protestors’ actions in a statement to CNBC.

“Hundreds of artists in our alpha have shaped Sora’s development, helping prioritize new features and safeguards,” the OpenAI spokesperson said at the time. “Participation is voluntary, with no obligation to provide feedback or use the tool. We’ve been excited to offer these artists free access and will continue supporting them through grants, events, and other programs.”

The pieces are coming together for the startup basketball league Unrivaled.

The 3×3 women’s hoops league announced Tuesday that it has signed a multiyear deal for Under Armour to become its official uniform partner and performance outfitter. This follows the league announcing a number of recent big player signings and reaching a media broadcast deal in October with TNT Sports.

Financial terms of the deal were not provided, but Under Armour will provide all players, coaches and staff with performance apparel and accessories both on and off the court.

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with Unrivaled to outfit some of the best women’s basketball players in the world as they compete on this exciting new stage,” said Sean Eggert, Under Armour senior vice president of global sports marketing.

The retailer said that all players who do not have an active shoe deal will have Under Armour basketball footwear options available to them. Additionally, Under Armour will give players the opportunity to create custom products.

Unrivaled will kick off its inaugural season Jan. 17 in Miami. The league has positioned itself as a destination for WNBA stars to play basketball in the U.S. during the offseason.

In the past, many WNBA players have had to go overseas to play in the offseason as a way to supplement the income. Starting salary in the WNBA is $64,154 according to ESPN.

Unrivaled has signed 36 top players by offering attractive financial incentives that include equity. The league said it offers the highest average salaries in women’s professional sports league history. It’s being backed by a number of investors.

This latest deal comes as Baltimore-based Under Armour is in the midst of a turnaround effort after founder Kevin Plank took the helm again this past March. Former Marriott executive Stephanie Linnartz had been in the role for barely a year before she was ousted; she was the second CEO the company had cycled through in less than two years.

Over the past few years, the brand has struggled to keep up with competition and drive full-price sales, relying on promotions and the off-price channel to move its products.

Before she left, Linnartz had been trying to market more to women and improve the product offering, but when Plank retook the helm, he walked that strategy back and said the company would be doubling down on its men’s apparel business. He later announced a turnaround plan that centers on making Under Armour a premium brand and pulling back on discounting so it can improve profits and boost demand.

Last month, the company saw a bright spot when reporting fiscal second-quarter earnings. It lifted its annual profit forecast and Plank said the turnaround is “beginning to gain traction.” Still, the stock is down about 81% from its all-time high on Sept. 17, 2015.

Under Armour’s deal with Unrivaled offers a glimpse into where the company is putting its money and, perhaps, indicates it wants to focus more on female athlete as it looks to capitalize on the hype of women’s sports to reenergize the brand.

Under Armour currently has partnerships with top women’s college programs such as the University of South Carolina, Notre Dame, Maryland and Utah.

“As a brand, we have a long history of investing in women’s basketball, from the grassroots level all the way up to the pros,” Eggert said.

TikTok in a court filing Monday warned that U.S. small businesses and social media creators would lose $1.3 billion in revenue and earnings in just one month if the popular app is effectively shut down in the United States on Jan. 19, under provisions of a law targeting national security concerns about its China-based parent company.

“Those numbers would only increase if the shutdown extends for more than a month,” said Blake Chandlee, president of global business solutions for TikTok, in that court filing.

Chandlee’s declaration came as his company asked a federal appeals court to temporarily block a law that would require app stores operated by Apple and Google and internet providers to stop supporting TikTok on Jan. 19 unless its parent company ByteDance sells the app.

TikTok and ByteDance plan to ask the Supreme Court to overturn a recent ruling upholding the law, issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“The Supreme Court should have an opportunity, as the only court with appellate jurisdiction over this action, to decide whether to review this exceptionally important case,” TikTok and ByteDance said in the filing, seeking a temporary injunction.

The injunction, if granted, would allow the app to continue operating until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the appeal.

The filing also argued that “an injunction is especially appropriate” because it will give the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, the opportunity to decide if it wants to enforce the law.

If TikTok is effectively shut down in the United States in January, Chandlee wrote, American small businesses alone would lose more than $1 billion in revenue — even if the prohibitions are lifted after only a month.

“Almost two million creators in the United States would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings, and TikTok itself would lose 29% of our targeted global advertising revenue for 2025,” Chandlee wrote.

He said that as of November, more than 7 million U.S. accounts use TikTok to do business.

And “69% of these businesses say that using TikTok has led to increased sales for their businesses in the last year, and 39% say that access to TikTok is critical to their business’s existence,” he said, citing an economic impact report prepared for the company by Oxford Economics.

Chandlee also said in the filing that those businesses’ advertising, marketing and “organic reach on TikTok” contributed $24.2 billion to U.S. gross domestic product in 2023, with TikTok’s own operations adding another $8.5 billion to U.S. GDP.

The law TikTok wants blocked for now was passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden last spring after concerns about ByteDance’s alleged connections to the Chinese government.

In its unanimous ruling Friday, a three-judge panel on the appeals court in the District of Columbia rejected ByteDance’s argument that the ban would violate the First Amendment rights of 170 million U.S. users of the app, or other parts of the Constitution.

The panel, in its written opinion, said that the U.S. government “offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that” the divestment law “is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” and noted that TikTok “never squarely denies that it has ever manipulated content at the direction of the” People’s Republic of China.