Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year

As OpenAI files SEC paperwork ahead of an expected initial public stock offering, newly leaked financial documents show a company with quickly growing revenues that are currently being overwhelmed by even larger expenses.

The audited financial statements, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, show OpenAI’s reported revenue growing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents, writes that the company’s monthly revenues had grown to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting that its ongoing revenue rates continued to grow throughout the year.

But the company’s fast-growing revenues are still dwarfed by its even more significant expenses. OpenAI’s total revenues in both of the last two years were outpaced by research and development alone, which grew from a $7.81 billion line item in 2024 to a massive $19.18 billion cost in 2025. Those numbers seem to reflect the significant costs OpenAI incurred in training new models and include $10.59 billion in R&D costs paid to Microsoft alone in 2025.

On top of that, OpenAI’s “cost of revenue” (i.e., the money spent producing and distributing the product) increased from $2.65 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025. This cost line likely reflects the significant compute costs incurred at “inference time” as the company’s models respond to a growing number of user prompts. Costs associated with sales and marketing also grew from $1.11 billion in 2024 to $5.73 billion in 2025.

All told, OpenAI’s day-to-day “loss from operations” increased from $8.78 billion in 2024 to $20.92 billion in 2025, a concerning direction for a company that is telling investors it hopes to be profitable by 2030. But measured as a percentage of revenues, the company’s operating losses slightly improved year to year, from 237 percent in 2024 to 160 percent in 2025.