Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year
Ars Technica AI · Kyle Orland · 2026-06-16
Leaked audited financial statements show OpenAI's 2025 R&D expenses reached $19.18 billion — dwarfing $13.07 billion in revenue — with $10.59 billion paid to Microsoft, as the company prepares for an IPO.
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Extraction
Topics: openai-financialsai-industry-economicsllm-costsai-ipo
Claims
- OpenAI's revenue grew from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025, with monthly revenues approaching $2 billion by year-end 2025.
- OpenAI's R&D expenses alone reached $19.18 billion in 2025, exceeding its total revenues and making the company deeply unprofitable.
- OpenAI paid $10.59 billion in R&D costs to Microsoft in 2025, reflecting the compute infrastructure costs underlying its model training.
- The leaked documents were obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron and independently reviewed by the Financial Times.
Key quotes
OpenAI's total revenues in both of the last two years were outpaced by research and development alone, which grew from a $7.81 billion line item in 2024 to a massive $19.18 billion cost in 2025.
Those numbers seem to reflect the significant costs OpenAI incurred in training new models and include $10.59 billion in R&D costs paid to Microsoft alone in 2025.