OpenAI’s $39B Loss Masks $2B Monthly Revenue and 8x Growth

Published by James Harris on June 16, 2026June 16, 2026

OpenAI filed confidential IPO documents with the SEC earlier this month, disclosing a $39 billion loss for 2025 against roughly $13 billion in revenue, while simultaneously revealing that monthly revenue had doubled to $2 billion by December. The headline number is alarming until you read past it.

The $39 billion loss is almost entirely an accounting artifact. Before OpenAI converted to a public benefit corporation at the end of 2025, early investors held convertible interests treated as debt liabilities under US accounting rules. As the company’s valuation climbed, that liability had to be revalued upward, producing a roughly $30 billion non-cash charge that will not repeat under the new structure. Strip that out, along with employee compensation and Microsoft cloud credits, and the operating deficit lands closer to $8 billion on $13 billion in revenue. That is still a company burning cash at a serious rate, but the framing of “history’s largest startup loss” obscures a business that grew revenue roughly 8x in a single year and may now be generating enough monthly inflow to matter.

The $19 billion R&D line is the number that actually deserves scrutiny, not the headline loss.

Anthropic’s June 1 IPO filing, at a private valuation approaching $952 billion, has compressed the timeline for OpenAI considerably. If both companies list in 2026, they would enter public markets as the second and third largest technology IPOs in history, behind only SpaceX, which remains private. That competitive dynamic explains why management canceled side projects including the Sora video synthesizer and refocused resources on ChatGPT and enterprise applications. The OpenAI IPO filing also carries legal weight into any roadshow: unresolved lawsuits over younger user safety and the residual fallout from Elon Musk’s challenge to the nonprofit conversion are not resolved, merely survived. Institutional investors pricing a $1 trillion valuation will need a clean story on governance, and OpenAI does not yet have one.

Sam Altman has said the SEC filing keeps the IPO option open rather than committing to it, and has told staff that staying private may still make more sense. Given that the company raised at a $730 billion valuation in March without public markets, the pressure to list is competitive rather than financial. Whether a public offering happens in fall 2025 or sometime in 2026 depends less on the balance sheet than on whether Anthropic’s listing sets a price that OpenAI wants to chase or avoid.