(Credit: Philip Dulian/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As expected, Anthropic was among the companies that paid millions for a Super Bowl ad, but the one that aired differed slightly from the version that it teased last week.
The new ad campaign features a promise from Anthropic that it has no immediate plans to introduce ads to its Claude AI chatbot. The ad depicts an AI as a person, accompanying a user on a workout and telling them what to do, but its dialogue is full of sponsored recommendations.
At its initial debut, and still live on Anthropic’s YouTube channel, the ad had a tagline of “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” If you saw the ad on TV, it said, “There is a time and place for ads. Your conversations with AI should not be one of them.”
The spot is a clear shot at OpenAI, which recently announced ads for ChatGPT. After Anthropic previewed its Super Bowl ad and published a blog post that said, "Claude will remain ad-free," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that Anthropic was being "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," Altman tweeted. "We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that." He then remarked that it's "on brand" for Anthropic to be deceptive, "but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it."
It may be that Anthropic wanted to tone down its attack on ChatGPT before running the ads to a wider audience. Or maybe some lawyers stepped in. Since the original is still live on YouTube, Anthropic may have chosen a different approach for its core audience.
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.