OpenAI Owner Responds to Super Bowl Ad Mocking Ads in Chatbots
A flashy Super Bowl ad campaign has sparked a very public dispute between two of the biggest names in AI: OpenAI and Anthropic.
Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, is spending millions on Super Bowl commercials that take aim at the idea of ads inside AI chatbots. The ads poke fun at how advertising could intrude on the personal and often sensitive conversations people have with AI tools. Each spot ends with the line: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
The campaign follows OpenAI’s recent announcement that it plans to start testing ads in ChatGPT for logged-in free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers. OpenAI says those ads will be clearly labeled and appear separately from answers, and that they won’t affect how ChatGPT responds.
Still, the move clearly struck a nerve.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired back in a long post on X, accusing Anthropic of being “dishonest” and “deceptive.” He argued that the ads shown in Anthropic’s campaign don’t reflect how OpenAI would ever run advertising. “We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them,” Altman wrote. “We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.”
Altman also defended ads as a way to keep ChatGPT widely accessible, saying OpenAI wants to offer AI tools to people who can’t afford subscriptions. In contrast, he claimed, “Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.”
However, Altman’s response didn’t land the way he may have hoped. On social media, critics mocked the length and tone of his post, with one user comparing it to “the digital equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum.” Another summed it up bluntly: “Never respond to playful humour with an essay.”
Anthropic hasn’t mentioned OpenAI or ChatGPT by name in its ads, but the message is clear. The company says Claude will remain ad-free, with no sponsored links next to conversations and no influence from advertisers. Ads, Anthropic argues, would feel “incongruous” and in some cases “inappropriate,” given how personal users’ chats can be.
The stakes are high. Anthropic is airing both a pregame and in-game Super Bowl ad, with 30-second slots costing around $8 million on average and some climbing past $10 million. While that’s a huge spend, it’s small compared to how much AI companies are pouring into infrastructure and development.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, says it plans to fund itself through subscriptions and enterprise deals, even if that means walking away from ad revenue. “This is a choice with tradeoffs, and we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions,” the company said.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is juggling massive infrastructure commitments and looking for new revenue streams, much like other tech giants that rely heavily on advertising.
What started as a tongue-in-cheek Super Bowl campaign has turned into a serious moment in the AI rivalry that highlights very different visions for how chatbots should make money, and how close advertising should get to users’ conversations.
