OpenAI has axed another product. This time it’s 'Adult Mode'—shelved before it even launched. But the real story isn’t about 'Adult Mode' itself; it’s about what’s going wrong with OpenAI’s product strategy. The 'Adult Mode' situation: announced last October, originally set to launch in December. Then, all eight mental health advisors hired by OpenAI unanimously opposed it. The reason? The age verification system had a 12% failure rate—meaning millions of minors could potentially access adult content. On top of that, it wasn’t technically feasible: the model was specifically trained to avoid generating explicit content, and now it’s expected to produce it while filtering out illegal material. The model simply can’t make that switch. On March 26, it was indefinitely shelved. TechCrunch’s headline nailed it: 'OpenAI abandons yet another side quest.' But that’s not the main point. The real issue is this pattern: announce → delay → shelve/cancel. Over the past year, here’s what OpenAI has scrapped: - **Sora Video**—secured a Disney deal, hit 3.3M downloads, ranked #1 on the App Store. Shut down on March 24. Total revenue: $2.1M, not even enough to cover GPU electricity costs. - **Stargate Expansion**—canceled after failing to secure funding with Oracle. - **In-app Purchases**—announced, then canceled. - **Hardware Devices**—promised for this year, but court documents show it’s delayed until 2027. See the pattern? OpenAI’s AI itself is solid. GPT remains strong, and the 'o' series has real substance. The problem is that every strategic expansion outside of AI has failed—video, hardware, shopping, adult content—every direction follows the same cycle: announce, sprint, retreat. Sam Altman once said, 'AI + ads is the last resort.' 16 months later, they launched ads. When a company starts doing what it said it wouldn’t, while abandoning what it promised it would—this is called strategic misalignment.