Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year
OpenAI's leaked financial documents reveal a net loss of nearly $39 billion in 2025, though $30 billion is a one-time accounting charge. The company aims to cut costs and focus on core business users.
Gotta spend money to make money
Operating numbers aside, OpenAI’s headline “net loss” number of just over $5 billion in 2024 ballooned to nearly $39 billion in 2025. But the 2025 number includes a significant accounting charge related to investor valuations that shifted amid the company’s 2025 conversion to a for-profit structure. The Financial Times cites “a person familiar with the matter” in reporting that this non-recurring charge was approximately $30 billion and that OpenAI’s 2025 net loss amounted to a more reasonable-looking $8 billion without it.
As OpenAI tries to shift all these losses to eventual profits, it will have to start reining in its costs, especially the massive (and growing) R&D costs associated with model training. It will also have to deal with enterprise customers that are beginning to balk at token-based pricing and starting to demand a measurable return on investment for their AI spending. And on the subscription side, pressure from rival Anthropic may force the company to lower prices, which could further increase operating losses in the near term.
OpenAI shut down its Sora video generation model in March. Around the same time, OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo told employees that the company would be cutting back on “side quests” and focusing on its core coding and business users.
In March, OpenAI raised $122 billion of financing in a funding round that valued the company at $852 billion. The company reports over 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, though only about 50 million of those are paid subscribers.