Docs: audited financial figures show OpenAI spent $34B in 2025, up 172% YoY, including $19B on research and development and nearly $6B on sales and marketing
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed AtEd Zitron
Context & Ripple Effects
The related coverage traces a rapid escalation in OpenAI’s financial scale: investor disclosures had already pointed to R&D-led cash burn in the first half of 2025, while subsequent reports describe a much larger reported net loss and continued cash consumption in early 2026.
These audited spending figures add detail to that arc by separating the outlay into product/research and go-to-market investment, while the Q1 report indicates OpenAI had materially expanded its cash and marketable-securities cushion.
First-order effects
OpenAI’s audited accounts make clear that research and development was its largest disclosed spending category in 2025, with substantial additional expenditure on sales and marketing.
The figures give investors, partners, and customers a more concrete basis to assess OpenAI’s operating costs alongside the revenue, losses, and cash-balance disclosures in related reporting.
Second-order effects
A spending profile weighted toward R&D and commercial distribution increases pressure on competing AI providers to fund both model development and enterprise/customer acquisition rather than treating either as optional.
The scale of the disclosed outlay makes continued access to capital and the conversion of commercial activity into durable revenue more consequential for OpenAI’s strategic flexibility.
Third-order effects
If comparable spending persists across leading AI developers, frontier-model competition is likely to become more capital-intensive and favor organizations able to finance prolonged research, infrastructure, and distribution costs.
Greater disclosure of losses, burn, and cash reserves could shift attention from headline adoption toward whether AI companies can sustain their investment pace and commercialize it efficiently.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from AI-model competition as a research race to competition over the capital required to fund research and global commercialization simultaneously.
Here's a fun piece from Ed Zitron in late 2024 talking about how implausible OAI's revenue estimates for '25 were (they beat them by over $1bn) and how margins will come down due to reasoning models (his numbers show gross margins improving). [image]
Note the massive difference between how Zitron and the FT (who he shared the figures with) are reporting on this. I'll leave it to you to decide who to trust... [image]
My turn to chime in for “the other lab”: these numbers are basically in line with what I'd expect, and calling this a scandal shows that Ed doesn't understand how exponentials work.
Hold on a second, does this mean OpenAI lost DOUBLE the money than what Sam Altman publicly claimed in 2025!? If this isn't securities fraud at this point let's just scrap that law 🤷🏻♂️
Exclusive: I have seen OpenAI's audited financials for 2024 and 2025. In 2025, OpenAI had $13.07 billion in revenue and $34 billion in costs. $867 million of its revenue came from SoftBank, and $303 million came from Microsoft. https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ...
So.....Next biggest IPO ever? SpaceX is also losing billions of dollars it didn't prevent them from reaching 2T valuation. The stock market & billionaires have broken the system & we all live in its ruins while they steal it all from us. — We all knew this but its nice to see…
This is remarkable. It's not hard to make a big business if you charge $10 and give customers back $30 for a long time. When OpenAI runs out of cash to give away, they'll have to charge three times as much. Few customers will pay x3 current costs. Growth will crater, and the …
Whoa... “The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning. $38.53 billion in losses are astronomical, and far higher than most believed it would be.... Losses also appear to be mounting yr-over-yr...and I'm not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustaina…
It's startling but not unprecedented in venture-backed businesses to have losses greater than revenues while getting started. But I've never seen a company whose R&D costs ALONE are greater than revenue. What's in that bucket??? — www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive- op...
it's here! OpenAI lost a lot of money in 2025 but we're going to leave trying to make sense of the numbers to FT, whose article on the same info www.ft.com/content/e15b... I would love to read but is paywalled [embedded post]