FiscalNote, the policy and regulatory data company whose revenue has been in freefall for the past year, is betting it can arrest the decline by becoming AI infrastructure rather than a destination app.
The company launched PolicyNote MCP in the OpenAI App Store on Tuesday, a Model Context Protocol integration that lets ChatGPT's more than 700 million weekly active users query FiscalNote's real-time policy intelligence directly within conversations and AI-powered workflows, without manual integration work. The listing, first reported by Stock Titan, marks FiscalNote's second major OpenAI partnership — it was among 14 inaugural ChatGPT plugin trusted partners in March 2023, a launch that sent its stock soaring 66 percent in a single day, according to FiscalNote's announcement.
But FiscalNote CEO Josh Resnik frames the new listing as something categorically different. "Our listing in the OpenAI App Store represents an important step in FiscalNote's evolution from a destination platform to global policy intelligence infrastructure," he said in a statement. The distinction matters: plugins were retrieval interfaces. MCP, which Resnik called an emergent standard in the agentic AI community on the company's Q4 2025 earnings call, is a deeper protocol designed to let AI agents — not just human users — call FiscalNote's data as part of automated workflows. The protocol also supports integration with platforms including Claude, Google Gemini, and Microsoft ecosystems, according to FiscalNote's earnings materials.
The timing is urgent. FiscalNote reported full-year 2025 revenue of 95.4 million dollars, down sharply from 120.3 million dollars in 2024 — a decline of roughly 21 percent. The company provided 2026 guidance of 80 million dollars to 83 million dollars, implying further erosion. On Tuesday's earnings call, CFO Jon Slabaugh reported Q4 revenue of 22.2 million dollars against a GAAP net loss of 22.9 million dollars, which included a 12.4 million dollar non-cash goodwill impairment charge. Adjusted EBITDA was 2.5 million dollars — the tenth consecutive positive quarter by that metric, but against a shrinking topline, according to earnings call highlights.
The response has been a sharp restructuring. Resnik said on the call that FiscalNote is cutting cash operating expenses by more than 19 percent and reducing headcount by approximately 25 percent year-over-year. The company expects to generate positive free cash flow by the end of Q1 2027. Resnik also said FiscalNote has achieved 100 percent adoption of AI tooling across its engineering organization, with development cycles now running approximately three times faster than before — a claim that will need verification against independent data.
The MCP listing comes with data protections that distinguish it from a typical plugin. FiscalNote's proprietary data is not made available for model training, and FiscalNote controls all pricing and access terms — OpenAI's App Store functions as what the company calls a global discovery layer, not a data-sharing arrangement. That matters for enterprise customers skittish about exposing proprietary policy intelligence to model training pipelines.
The 700 million weekly active user figure is worth scrutinizing. FiscalNote cited OpenAI's own January 2026 reporting for that number, not a third-party measurement. OpenAI has not published detailed weekly active user methodology, and the company has an interest in projecting scale. The practical reach of the integration — what fraction of ChatGPT users actually install and use an App Store-listed MCP — is a separate and unknowable question from the headline user count.
The 2023 plugin launch generated a 66 percent one-day stock surge. The 2026 MCP listing comes against a backdrop of revenue decline, aggressive cost cuts, and a pivot in strategic positioning that has yet to show results in the numbers. Whether MCP can convert ChatGPT's massive user base into durable policy intelligence revenue for FiscalNote depends on whether enterprises actually build automated workflows that depend on it — and FiscalNote has roughly a year to prove that thesis before its cash position becomes acute.
