OpenAI's leaked financials

OpenAI's financials just leaked. The original reporting came from an independent journalist and blogger, Ed Zitron. He obtained audited financials and the Financial Times then independently verified the figures. His headline numbers are 13.07 billion in revenue against 38.53 billion in net losses in 2025. Also, the Microsoft relationship where OpenAI paid Microsoft $17.2 billion across R&D and other expenses. And Microsoft paid OpenAI was paid $867 million by SoftBank and $303 million from Microsoft in 2025. Back $303 million. Of course, an honourable mention who paid OpenAI $806 $7 million. This piece paints a bleak picture, but it's very much in line with opinions this in the past on the ROI or lack thereof of AI, the economics that may or may not make sense here and so forth. There are many nuances with these numbers. A person familiar with the matter shared with the Financial Times. And when you strip out non-cash accounting, non-recurring charges, and other "non-cash expenses" like stock-based compensation of staff or computing credits from Microsoft, OpenAI's true "out-of-pocket" cash burn for the year was around $8 billion, according to the anonymous source. There are more nuances to consider here is that OpenAI has 25 billion in cash reserves, predominantly coming from its funding. But the biggest happens next. Much of OpenAI's compute comes from Microsoft prepaid credit and not cash. That OpenAI is already paid out. It looks like these inference costs between $8.7 and $9 billion dollars for the first three quarters of 2025. These credits run out. That's the type of cost we're gonna see you leaving the OpenAI box. There's obviously more to this, but I'm curious, did any of this surprise you? There's been so much chatter about this burn across every platform that touches tech. It seems like the numbers just confirm where the conversation was already heading, of reactions around the severity or rationale of this type of spend.