OpenAI‘s 2025 financial statements have leaked — showing a company growing fast, spending faster, and moving toward a public offering that will ask investors to bet on a business losing more than it earns.
The audited documents, obtained by journalist Ed Zitron and independently verified by the Financial Times, show that revenue reached $13.07 billion in 2025 — more than triple the $3.7 billion OpenAI posted in 2024, and ahead of the company’s own internal target of $10 billion. The documents also show that total costs and expenses reached $34 billion, producing an operating loss of $20.92 billion. The net loss reached $38.5 billion once OpenAI added charges from its nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion — including a $41.55 billion swing from the fair value of convertible interests and warrant liability.
Not surprisingly, research and development drove the bulk of the spending. OpenAI put $19.18 billion into R&D in 2025 — more than its entire annual revenue — up from $7.81 billion in 2024. Sales and marketing hit $5.73 billion, up from $1.11 billion. A significant share of those costs ran through Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), which received $17.2 billion from OpenAI for cloud computing, R&D support, and related services. Microsoft paid OpenAI $303 million in return. SoftBank paid OpenAI $867 million.
Still, the company is becoming more efficient even as absolute losses mount. In 2024, OpenAI spent $2.37 to generate every dollar of revenue. In 2025, that ratio fell to $1.60. Monthly revenues reached nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, and OpenAI finished the year with roughly $50 billion in total assets, about half held in cash.
The numbers surfaced days after OpenAI confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the process toward a public listing expected later in 2026. The leaked financials give prospective investors an early glimpse of what the S-1 will contain. OpenAI declined to comment on the leaked figures.
Around the same time, New York Attorney General Letitia James served OpenAI with a subpoena on behalf of a 42-state coalition — the broadest state-level investigation ever launched against an AI company — demanding records on advertising, user engagement, consumer and health data, treatment of minors and seniors, and model sycophancy.
Florida separately filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI, naming CEO Sam Altman personally, alleging the company concealed safety risks and collected data from minors without adequate parental oversight. OpenAI said it would engage constructively with the states.
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