OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch posted criticisms on X after Anthropic released four commercials, including two set to air during the Super Bowl, that mock the idea of advertising inside AI chatbot conversations. The timing follows OpenAI’s own experimentation with ads in a lower-cost ChatGPT tier.
Altman called the ads “clearly dishonest” and accused Anthropic of being “authoritarian” and “serving an expensive product to rich people.” Rouch added a sharp retort: “Real betrayal isn’t ads. It’s control.”
Anthropic’s campaign, titled “A Time and a Place,” opens each spot with a single-word provocation — “Betrayal,” “Violation,” “Deception,” and “Treachery” — as a person asks a human stand-in for AI advice, only to encounter a product pitch. One ad shows a therapist-style bot pivoting from therapy tips to promoting a dating site; another leans into a height-boosting insole pitch. The campaign ends with the line: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
Anthropic plans to air a 30-second Super Bowl LX spot, with a 60-second cut shown in the pregame, CNBC reports. OpenAI, meanwhile, contends the ads are misleading because ChatGPT ads will appear as banners at the bottom of answers and will not alter the chatbot’s responses. OpenAI, however, notes in its own blog that ads may be conversation-specific.
The dispute sits in a broader tech-finance context: OpenAI has pursued massive infrastructure deals and is projecting substantial revenue even as only a fraction of ChatGPT’s hundreds of millions of weekly users pay for subscriptions. Anthropic, still growing, relies on enterprise contracts and subscriptions rather than advertising and has not matched OpenAI’s infrastructure footprint.
