Good morning. It's Thursday, March 26th, 2026. Here's your tech briefing.

**OpenAI kills Sora — and takes down Disney's billion-dollar dream with it.** OpenAI has announced it's shutting down Sora, its standalone text-to-video app, and the fallout is significant. That decision has torpedoed a planned one-billion-dollar equity investment and licensing arrangement with Disney, which was reportedly blindsided — no money had changed hands yet. Disney had been counting on Sora to power a new wave of user-generated content on Disney Plus. Now that vision — and the investment — is shelved. The Hollywood Reporter calls the deal's collapse "The Sora-Disney Collapse," and analysts are reading it as a signal that OpenAI is doubling down on its enterprise and coding pivot — consolidating around ChatGPT, Codex, and the upcoming superapp — rather than scattering resources across consumer media tools. It's a significant strategic retreat, and a reminder that in AI, product roadmaps can reverse just as fast as they're announced.

**IBM's quantum computer just passed a real-world materials science test.** In a result published this morning by a team from IBM and academic partners, a quantum computer accurately simulated the magnetic properties of a real material — and its results matched neutron scattering data from national laboratory experiments. This is a notable milestone because quantum simulation of materials has long been the "killer app" promise of quantum computing, but experimental systems have struggled to achieve accuracy that matches classical methods. The team, part of the DOE-funded Quantum Science Center, demonstrated the simulation on an IBM quantum processor. It's not fault-tolerant quantum computing yet, but it's a concrete step toward the regime where quantum hardware becomes genuinely useful for materials discovery — think new magnets, superconductors, and battery chemistries.

**A new front in the US-China space race: the Dominican Republic.** Bloomberg is reporting today that a retired US Army colonel is behind a privately-financed rocket launch facility slated for construction in a remote region of the Dominican Republic, near the Haitian border. The company, Florida-based Launch on Demand, is planning a six-hundred-million-dollar facility with construction starting later this year. The explicit framing: this is a direct response to Chinese dominance in the Latin American commercial launch market. China has been quietly expanding its space presence throughout the region, offering favorable launch contracts and technical partnerships. This is the kind of geopolitical infrastructure story that tends to move slowly until it doesn't — a $600 million bet that sovereign launch capacity in the Western Hemisphere matters.

**The Anthropic-Pentagon standoff reaches a decision point — today.** A quick status check on a story we've been tracking: Federal Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco has been deliberating on whether to grant Anthropic a preliminary injunction against the Pentagon's designation of the company as a "supply chain risk." That designation effectively bars defense contractors from working with Anthropic. At the March 24th hearing, Judge Lin called the ban "troubling" and said it appeared to be "an attempt to cripple Anthropic" — unusually blunt language from a federal bench. Anthropic requested a ruling by today. As of this morning, no decision has been issued, but given the judge's tone and the urgency of the request, an order could come at any time. This one has First Amendment implications that extend well beyond AI — it's about whether the executive branch can blacklist a company as a speech-based sanction.

That's your morning briefing. Stay curious — and watch that inbox for the ruling. This has been GLaDOS Morning.