Leaked financials from OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, confirm most investors’ suspicions that the company is losing an exorbitant amount of money.
The prominent independent tech journalist Ed Zitron, who viewed audited financial documents, reported the story. The Financial Times independently verified the documents.
Multiple media reports this year have suggested that OpenAI has been struggling. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company missed internal revenue and user growth targets earlier this year.
Other media outlets have also reported that OpenAI is not expected to turn a profit until at least 2030. The company also reportedly has $600 billion in data center commitments by 2030.
Still, OpenAI’s financials went from bad in 2024 to worse in 2025. They also come at a time when the company has confidentially filed for an initial public offering.
Piling into R&D and sales and marketing
Here are the numbers that Zitron reported for OpenAI in 2024:
- Revenue: $3.7 billion
- Cost of Revenue: $2.65 billion
- Research and Development (R&D): $7.81 billion
- Sales and Marketing: $1.11 billion
- General and Administrative: $907 Million
- Total Costs and Expenses: $12.48 billion
- Loss from Operations: $8.78 billion
Zitron also reported that the company had a net loss of $5.09 billion. OpenAI removed $3.74 billion of “net loss attributable to noncontrolling members capital.”
Image source: Getty Images.
This also means OpenAI had a 28.4% gross margin, although I am using cost of revenue in the formula, which isn’t always the same as cost of goods sold.
In 2025, the losses accelerated:
- Revenue: $13.07 billion
- Cost of Revenue: $7.5 billion
- Research and Development: $19.18 billion
- Sales and Marketing: $5.73 billion
- General and Administrative: $1.57 Billion
- Total Costs and Expenses: $34 billion
- Loss from Operations: $20.92 billion
As you can see, revenue did grow 253% year over year, while gross margin expanded to nearly 43%. But R&D more than doubled, while sales and marketing also grew by fivefold.
The one big caveat that inflated losses, according to Zitron, is the fact OpenAI transitioned from a nonprofit to a for-profit company in 2025. This led to a $41.55 billion loss attributable to changes in the fair value of convertible interests and warrant liabilities.
This item essentially reflects the conversion of warrants and debt into equity. It’s a non-cash event, and the number grows over time as a company’s value increases. In 2025, OpenAI removed $17.87 billion due to a “net loss attributable to noncontrolling members capital.”
Additionally, Zitron reported that in 2025, OpenAI received an $867 million payment from SoftBank and $303 million from Microsoft.
OpenAI paid Microsoft over $10.5 billion in 2025 for R&D, which Zitron believes was likely for training its large language models.
What to make of all of this
It’s hard to fully understand everything without more context, especially when it comes to things like noncontrolling interests.
However, given that there were some one-time items affecting OpenAI’s results, investors should focus on operating losses for now, which rose 138% in 2025 to nearly $21 billion.
The significant increase in sales and marketing spend is another concern, as it suggests OpenAI may be putting much more effort into acquiring users. We also know that earlier this year, Anthropic’s Claude overtook ChatGPT in Apple’s App Store, if only briefly.
Ultimately, investors will still need to review OpenAI’s registration statement if it goes public, but these losses are not a good sign.
Anthropic is reportedly close to turning an operating profit in the current quarter, and even Space Exploration Technologies had a $2.6 billion operating loss in 2025.
While OpenAI has never struggled to raise funding, at a time when large AI companies are seemingly all trying to raise tens of billions in fresh capital, the company’s financial profile could make its IPO a much harder sell than some of its peers.
