I have previously noted I am not a fan of Ed Zitron’s writing on A.I., which I think is driven more often by adherence to narrative than by genuine skepticism. Even so, his newsletter is extremely popular, and occasionally that pays off with honest-to-goodness scoops. Yesterday, he got a big one — a smattering of OpenAI financial documents revealing the company’s spending and earnings for the past two years. In 2024, it made billions of dollars less than it spent — including over a billion dollars on sales and marketing alone — and its 2025 numbers look even worse:

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 year-over-year at a dramatic rate, and I’m not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability.

Zitron shared these documents with the Financial Times, which independently verified them, and added some much-needed context. In particular, that whopping $38.5 billion loss accrued in 2025 and highlighted by Zitron — including in his headline — seems far less dramatic:

Before OpenAI’s switch late last year to become a public benefit corporation, investors in the company received convertible interest rights rather than conventional equity. Under US accounting rules, those interests were treated as liabilities and periodically revalued as the company’s valuation increased.

As OpenAI’s worth rose, the increased value of those investor rights created a roughly $30bn charge, added the person. The charge is not expected to recur following the restructuring, they said.

That expense is not something that can be waved away, of course, but it does not seem to be materially related to the company’s actual costs of creating and selling its products. Losses without including that charge were, according to the Times’ “person familiar with the matter”, $8 billion, or roughly 60% more than in 2024. But that is against revenue of $13 billion in 2025, a significant increase over 2024’s $3.7 billion. (OpenAI, in the first three months of 2026, earned $5.7 billion.)

These juicy numbers were republished by outlets like Reuters, the Next Web, Stocktwits, Benzinga, and Startup Fortune. Shamefully, all attributed them solely to the Times without mentioning Zitron’s critical role. These publications — particularly Reuters — should be giving full credit to the original source.

That Zitron now has actual, verified numbers also allows us to check some of his own reporting. For example, in April, he was quite upset that “every outlet has continued to repeat that OpenAI ‘made $13 billion in 2025,’ despite that being very unlikely given that it would have required it to have made $8 billion in a single quarter”. It is unclear to me which outlets Zitron is referring to as I could find just one — Russia Today — using that quoted phrase verbatim.

Even so, Zitron goes on to write about some apparently conflicting numbers reported by Anthropic before concluding:

Though I cannot say for certain, both of these situations suggest that Anthropic and OpenAI are misleading their investors, the media and the general public. If I were a reporter who had written about Anthropic or OpenAI’s revenues previously, I would be concerned that I had published something that wasn’t true, and even if I was certain that I was correct, I would have to consider the existence of information that ran counter to my own. I would be concerned that Anthropic or OpenAI had lied to me, or that they were lying to someone else, and work diligently to try and find out what happened. I would, at the very least, publish that there was conflicting information.

Two days after this article, he again claimed that “every single story about OpenAI’s revenue other than my own reporting (which came directly from Azure) massively overinflates its sales”, which are more like “a mere $2.27 billion in the first half of last year”.

The numbers Zitron now has for OpenAI suggests this narrative is complete hogwash. Yes, these companies leak overly-optimistc annualized run rates, but if that was a factor in the audited financials Zitron obtained, he likely would have mentioned that. He does not — and neither does the Times, for that matter. “Due to the seriousness of this story”, Zitron wrote, “I am not going to do very much editorializing”, so we will see in a later issue of this newsletter whether he acknowledges this self-induced frenzy was all in his head.

This is why I read Zitron’s work in the framework of conspiracy thinking. He accused OpenAI of “massively overinflat[ing] its sales” and “misleading their investors” based on his own calculations using leaked Azure figures. But it turns out OpenAI did, apparently, have that $13 billion in real non-ARR-fudged revenue for last year, and its operating loss is shrinking. Real analysts, not me, can figure out whether this company is on a path to a functional business. Zitron conjured a whole fictional narrative out of misreading some numbers and then, it would seem with this latest update, misunderstanding them again because it is useful for the story. Still, he should be credited for this scoop.