(Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
OpenAI has confirmed that ads are coming to ChatGPT, and they've popped up in Google's AI Mode, too. However, Anthropic is spending millions to let you know its chatbot will remain ad-free.
The company will be among those companies paying big bucks for a Super Bowl ad. The 30-second spot, which reportedly costs more than $8 million, features a man asking an AI chatbot for a fitness plan. When he reveals that he's 5'7", the AI interjects with an ad for insoles that can add to his height, complete with a discount code.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic will also run a longer, pre-game spot featuring a man asking for help communicating with his mother; it also posted two other commercials on its X account. OpenAI also has plans for another Super Bowl ad this year.
But despite participating in one of the biggest advertising events of the year, none of these ads are coming to Anthropic's Claude chatbot. "Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see 'sponsored' links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for," the company writes in a blog post.
Anthropic says it also wants to avoid ads in a separate window to ensure Claude offers a "clear space to think and work." Including ads would "introduce an incentive to optimize for engagement," when sometimes, "the most useful AI interaction might be a short one, or one that resolves the user’s request without prompting further conversation," it says.
That said, Anthropic isn’t guaranteeing that it won’t ever reverse this decision. "Should we need to revisit this approach, we’ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so," it says.
'We Are Not Stupid'
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman weighed in this afternoon, arguing that Anthropic's ads are "clearly dishonest" because ChatGPT would "never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that."
Altman used his extended tweet to rib Anthropic over its user base. ("More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do") and says "Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people."
OpenAI's Super Bowl ad, meanwhile, is "about builders, and how anyone can now build anything," Altman says.
Editors' Note: This story was updated with comment from Altman.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.