As OpenAI prepares paperwork for a long-anticipated initial public offering, newly leaked audited financial statements offer the clearest view yet of the company's finances — and the numbers underline just how steep the path to profitability remains.
The financial statements, obtained and published by independent journalist Ed Zitron and independently reviewed by the Financial Times, show a company whose revenue is scaling faster than almost any business in history, but whose costs are scaling even faster. For more context on this story, see our ongoing breaking AI news.
Revenue Tripled to $13 Billion
OpenAI's reported revenue grew from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025, according to the audited statements. The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents, reported that monthly revenues had climbed to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting the company's run rate continued to accelerate through the year.
The company reports more than 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, though only about 50 million of those are paid subscribers. That gap frames both OpenAI's commercial opportunity and its central challenge as it courts public-market investors: turning enormous attention into durable, profitable revenue.
Costs Growing Even Faster
OpenAI's fast-growing revenue is still dwarfed by its expenses. Research and development alone grew from a $7.81 billion line item in 2024 to $19.18 billion in 2025, the documents show. Those R&D figures reportedly include $10.59 billion paid to Microsoft in 2025, reflecting the enormous compute costs of training frontier models on the software giant's cloud infrastructure.
The company's "cost of revenue" — the money spent producing and delivering its products — increased from $2.65 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025, a figure likely driven by the inference costs of answering a surging volume of user prompts. Sales and marketing spending also climbed sharply, from $1.11 billion to $5.73 billion over the same period.
Losses and the For-Profit Conversion Charge
Taken together, OpenAI's "loss from operations" increased from $8.78 billion in 2024 to $20.92 billion in 2025. Measured as a percentage of revenue, however, operating losses did narrow — from 237 percent in 2024 to 160 percent in 2025 — a modest sign that revenue is beginning to grow into the cost base.
OpenAI's headline net loss figure tells a more dramatic story, swelling from just over $5 billion in 2024 to nearly $39 billion in 2025. But the Financial Times, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that the 2025 figure includes a non-recurring accounting charge of roughly $30 billion tied to the company's conversion to a for-profit structure. Excluding that one-time charge, the 2025 net loss would amount to around $8 billion.
The Path to Profitability
As OpenAI works to convert those losses into profits, it faces pressure on multiple fronts. The company has told investors it hopes to reach profitability by 2030, but getting there will require reining in the massive and growing costs of model training.
On the enterprise side, customers are increasingly pushing back on token-based pricing and demanding a measurable return on their AI investment, a trend that pressures both OpenAI's top line and its margins. On the consumer side, competition from rivals such as Anthropic could force OpenAI to lower subscription prices, a move that could widen losses in the near term even if it protects market share.
Signs of cost discipline are already emerging. OpenAI shut down its Sora video-generation product in March, and around the same time Fidji Simo, the company's CEO of Applications, told employees that OpenAI would be cutting back on "side quests" to focus on its core coding and business users.
A Record Fundraise and a Lofty Valuation
The financial picture arrives alongside record fundraising. In March, OpenAI raised $122 billion in a funding round that valued the company at $852 billion, underscoring how much capital investors are willing to commit to the category leader despite the red ink.
As the company moves toward a public listing, the leaked documents give prospective investors a concrete sense of the bet on offer: a business with explosive revenue growth, a dominant consumer product in ChatGPT, and losses that — while narrowing as a share of revenue — remain measured in the tens of billions of dollars.
A Defining Test for AI Economics
The disclosures also carry implications far beyond one company. OpenAI's financials are the most detailed window yet into the underlying economics of the frontier AI industry, where the cost of training ever-larger models and serving hundreds of millions of users has so far outpaced even surging demand.
Whether the trajectory bends toward profit — as OpenAI's pitch to investors insists — or the losses prove structural, will help shape how the broader market values the entire generation of AI companies now racing toward the public markets. For now, the audited numbers make clear that the industry's most prominent player is still buying its growth at a premium measured in billions.
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