Sam Altman: OpenAI Is “Losing Money”, Shares 2025 Agentic AI Outlook

The road to profitability for OpenAI remains uncertain as the CEO, Sam Altman, revealed on Sunday on X, “Insane thing: We are currently losing money on OpenAI Pro Subscriptions!” He blamed the high usage of ChatGPT. 

insane thing: we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions!

people use it much more than we expected.

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 6, 2025

“I personally chose the price,” Altman told one X user, adding, ”and thought we would make some money.”

no, i personally chose the price and thought we would make some money

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 6, 2025

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Pro last year and charges $2,400 for unlimited access to the company’s top model, OpenAI o1, as well as to o1-mini, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice. 

“While this problem demonstrates the product’s popularity, it’s not clear how OpenAI is meant to turn a profit, much less operate its costly business sustainably,” Goldman Sean Johnstone told clients on Tuesday. 

Tech Crunch noted, “OpenAI isn’t profitable, despite having raised around $20 billion since its founding. The company reportedly expected losses of about $5 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion last year.” 

… and this all seems sustainable. 

pls chill

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 6, 2025

Separately, Altman posted a blog entry on Sunday reflecting on the company’s journey over the past few years, highlighting that AI agents will be joining the US workforce this year. 

“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes,” he said. 

In November, Bloomberg cited multiple sources that said OpenAI was preparing to launch a new AI agent codenamed “Operator” that can use a computer to take actions on a person’s behalf, such as helping with IT support, HR support, sales and marketing, travel booking, and writing code. 

OpenAI’s eventual release of an Agentic AI tool could generate additional revenue streams for the money-losing startup, which is backed by Microsoft, as the development of more advanced models becomes increasingly expensive.