Leaked internal financial documents reviewed by Quartz and published on September 7, 2026, indicate that OpenAI lost approximately $38.5 billion in 2025, a figure that surfaces at a delicate moment as the ChatGPT maker prepares for a widely anticipated initial public offering.
The leak has reignited a debate that has been building in the AI industry for months: whether frontier AI labs are building the next great software businesses or something far more capital-hungry. Revenue grew roughly 3.5 times year over year according to commentary on the leaked documents, but expenses — dominated by compute, talent, and infrastructure — grew alongside it. For readers following the story as it develops, AI Buzz Wire continues to track every major AI business development as it happens.
What the Leaked Documents Show
According to Quartz's reporting, the leaked financials show OpenAI losing billions of dollars per year, with the 2025 full-year loss reaching approximately $38.5 billion. Secondary coverage, including a summary circulating on Stocktwits, cited a figure of roughly $39 billion for the same period, consistent with Quartz's reported number.
The revenue trajectory is the complicating factor. A 3.5x annual revenue increase would be extraordinary for almost any company in software history, and it explains why investors have continued to pour money into the company despite the losses. Amazon completed a $50 billion investment in OpenAI earlier this year, one of the largest single corporate commitments to an AI lab on record.
The IPO Question Gets Harder
The timing of the leak is awkward. OpenAI has been widely reported to be preparing for a public listing, and the offering is expected to be among the largest in history. Analysts at Benzinga and Investing.com have already been speculating about how the OpenAI IPO — and a parallel offering from rival Anthropic, which has also been preparing to go public — could drain liquidity from other parts of the technology market or even trigger tax-loss selling in struggling tech stocks.
Now potential public-market investors have something they have never had before: a detailed look at the actual economics. A $38.5 billion annual loss is not automatically disqualifying for a high-growth company — Amazon lost money for years while building its retail empire — but public investors typically demand a credible path to profitability, and the leaked documents suggest that path remains long and expensive.
Is AI a Software Business or a Utility?
The deeper question the leak raises, and one that analysts were debating within hours of the documents surfacing, is what kind of business frontier AI actually is. Traditional software companies enjoy gross margins of 70 to 80 percent because serving an additional customer costs nearly nothing. If AI labs are instead structured like capital-intensive utilities — with inference costs that scale linearly with usage, massive ongoing compute purchases, and intense price competition — the economics look far more like airlines or semiconductor manufacturing than like Salesforce.
The distinction matters enormously for valuation. A high-margin software company growing revenue 3.5x per year would command a premium few companies ever receive. A utility-scale business with matching capital requirements would be valued on very different terms, no matter how fast the top line grows.
Losses Were Already Visible
The 2025 numbers did not come entirely out of nowhere. Figures reported earlier this year showed OpenAI generating $6.7 billion in revenue in a single quarter while losing $12.3 billion over the same period, and Anthropic's own IPO filings have highlighted the enormous capital requirements of frontier model development. What is new is the full-year granularity and the confirmation that the losses persisted at scale even as revenue multiplied.
For the broader market, the worry is contagion. If the most successful AI company on the planet is losing $38.5 billion a year, every company building foundation models is almost certainly bleeding capital as well — and the investors funding them will eventually want returns.
What Happens Next
Neither OpenAI nor its investors have publicly disputed the leaked figures at the time of writing, and the company has not commented on the documents' authenticity. If the IPO proceeds, the S-1 filing will eventually make these numbers public in audited form, and any significant divergence from the leaked figures would become a story in itself.
Until then, the leak offers the clearest picture yet of the true cost of the AI race — and a preview of the scrutiny the company will face from public-market investors who have never met a loss they could underwrite indefinitely.
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