OpenAI is worth a cool $86 billion, according to private valuations, but the ChatGPT developer reported just $44,485 in revenue last year.
The artificial intelligence (AI) startup is a nonprofit, and that revenue figure comes from its 990 filing with the Internal Revenue Service, which establishes its tax-exempt status. The document was originally published by PlainSite last week.
Notably, nonprofits aren’t required by federal law to have their financial statements audited. In California, state law only requires an audit if a nonprofit’s revenue is greater than $2 million.
The document showed OpenAI well below that threshold in 2022. In fact, the AI darling hasn’t filed with the state of California since 2017, when it reported $33.2 million in revenue.
Meanwhile, reporting by The Information in August found that OpenAI generated $28 million in revenue in 2022 and that it would likely generate nearly $1 billion in revenue this year.
OpenAI was launched as a nonprofit in 2015, and the company launched a capped-profit arm in 2019. That let it effectively operate as a Silicon Valley startup, raising billions in investor funding.
The for-profit side of the company is what would later develop ChatGPT.
Concerns over OpenAI’s nonprofit status resurfaced last month when CEO Sam Altman was shockingly removed from his position at the company by its board of directors, which claimed he was not “consistently candid in his communications,” before being reinstated just days later with a new board in place.