OpenAI lost $21 billion last year on $13 billion in revenue, according to financial statements obtained by blogger Ed Zitron and the Financial Times. The numbers land days after the company confidentially filed for an IPO and weeks after a 42-state coalition subpoenaed the ChatGPT maker over chatbot safety.
The 2025 figures show a company growing fast but spending faster. Revenue tripled to $13.07 billion from $3.7 billion in 2024.
Research and development consumed $19.18 billion, more than double the prior year's $7.81 billion. Sales and marketing hit $5.73 billion, up from $1.11 billion.
Total costs reached $34 billion, producing a $20.92 billion operating loss. The picture improves slightly on a relative basis.
OpenAI spent $2.37 for every dollar of revenue in 2024. That ratio dropped to $1.60 in 2025, suggesting the company is becoming more efficient at scale even as absolute losses mount.
Yahoo Finance, citing the same Financial Times report, pegged OpenAI's net loss at roughly $39 billion when including restructuring charges and non-cash items. Excluding those, the loss was $8 billion. The leak arrives at an awkward moment.
OpenAI confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC last week, joining Anthropic, which filed confidentially for its own roughly $965 billion IPO around the same time. The disclosed financials give prospective investors an early look at what the S-1 will contain, and the numbers are ugly.
Compounding the pressure, New York Attorney General Letitia James served OpenAI with a subpoena on June 12 on behalf of a 42-state coalition. It is the broadest state-level investigation ever launched against an AI company, focused on ChatGPT's engagement hooks, chat memory, and "sycophancy", the tendency of AI models to tell users what they want to hear. The probe must be disclosed in OpenAI's IPO filing, adding a regulatory risk factor for investors.
The investigation targets how ChatGPT behaves, not just how it handles data. With 800 million weekly users, any regulatory tightening on chatbot tone or engagement mechanics could force product changes at a scale the industry has not seen.
OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at a $730 billion valuation, with a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic, which has not disclosed GAAP financials, said it expects an operating profit of $559 million in the June quarter, a sharp contrast to OpenAI's deepening losses.
