In brief
- Anthropic will air Super Bowl ads parodying what an ad-supported AI chatbot might feel like.
- The campaign takes aim at OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads into ChatGPT’s free tiers.
- The move underscores a growing divide over how consumer AI assistants should be monetized.
The AI arms race is heading to the Super Bowl.
Anthropic, the developer behind Claude AI, is using its first Super Bowl ad buy to take a direct shot at OpenAI. In a series of commercials posted online Wednesday ahead of the big game, the company mocked OpenAI’s shift into advertising embedded inside ChatGPT, focusing on how the ads could change the experience of using conversational AI.
In one 30-second spot, a routine fitness question veers into an unsolicited pitch for shoe insoles mid-response. In another, a user asks their chatbot how to communicate better with their mother, and up pops an ad for a mature dating service that connects “sensitive cubs with roaring cougars.”
In January, OpenAI announced it would begin testing ads for users of its free, and $8 a month ChatGPT Go tier. OpenAI has said its ads will appear at the bottom of responses and be clearly labeled; it also claimed that personal user data would not be sold to advertisers, and can be turned off by users.
“The thing about ads, when it comes to AI, is the way in which sponsored content could end up integrating with organic content in a way that’s not obvious to users,” Miranda Bogen, director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Decrypt.
The challenge, Bogen explained, centers on whether users can distinguish “organic” or “paid responses.”
“Financial incentives can skew those behaviors,” she said. “Any business model choice that AI companies are making now will have implications for the way the product functions, and we should be thinking about that holistically.”
In a blog post released Wednesday, Anthropic pledged to stay ad-free, acknowledging that the subscription-only approach carries financial trade-offs. To maintain its free tier without ad revenue, Anthropic said it is investing in smaller, more efficient models and exploring regional pricing or lower-cost tiers to expand global access.
“Conversations with AI assistants are meaningfully different. The format is open-ended; users often share context and reveal more than they would in a search query,” the company wrote. “This openness is part of what makes conversations with AI valuable, but it’s also what makes them susceptible to influence in ways that other digital products are not.”
A high-stakes bet
The Super Bowl ads come as Anthropic prepares to launch an IPO this year, leaving open the question of how long Anthropic can maintain its ad-free business model.
Bogen pointed to Anthropic’s willingness to run a Super Bowl ad campaign, where 30-second spots can cost as much as $10 million, as evidence of the scale and risk AI developers are willing to take to lure customers.
“The amount of money that’s being deployed in all directions when it comes to ads is just immense,” she said. “Running an extremely high-cost ad is just an example of the scale we’re talking about when it comes to what the competition for this space entails.”
In a post on X on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman praised Anthropic’s ads for their comedy, but called them “clearly dishonest.”
“Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them,” he wrote. “We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that.”
Altman hit back at Anthropic, calling the ads “on-brand for Anthropic doublespeak.” However, he acknowledged that a Super Bowl ad is not where he expected it, calling Anthropic’s AI “an expensive product to rich people.”
“Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI,” Altman wrote. “They block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.”
Anthropic has solidified its position as the primary “enterprise-first” alternative to OpenAI, distinguishing itself through a focus on AI safety, interpretability, and deeply integrated business tools. As of early 2026, Anthropic is one of the most valuable private companies in the world, with a reported valuation reaching $350 billion following its latest funding rounds.
There is a significant scale gap in consumer adoption, however. OpenAI boasts nearly 900 million weekly active users and roughly 3 million paying business users. In contrast, Anthropic serves approximately 30 million monthly users, but maintains a “moat” through over 300,000 active enterprise accounts that utilize its models for high-stakes, large-scale professional applications.
Its subscription model has also been a source of frustration for some consumers. Unlike OpenAI and Gemini’s $20 unlimited access model, Claude usage is tracked in 5-hour rolling blocks. For a standard Pro ($20) user, the limit is typically around 45 messages every 5 hours. Once you hit this, you are locked out until the earliest messages in that window “expire.” There’s also a weekly data cap.
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Source: https://decrypt.co/356946/anthropic-trolls-openai-chatgpt-super-bowl-campaign
