Dominic Preston, reporting for The Verge:

Anthropic has announced that it won’t be bringing ads to its AI chatbot Claude, in sharp contrast to confirmed plans from OpenAI to allow advertising in ChatGPT. To hammer the point home further, the company is releasing a Super Bowl commercial that makes fun of unnamed rivals adding adverts to their AI.

“We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests,” the company says in a new blog post. “So we’ve made a choice: 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 announcement goes on to highlight exactly why including ads “would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be.” It suggests the profit incentive could interfere with providing the most helpful advice to a user asking about health problems like sleeping issues, and that ads might prove a distraction for anyone using Claude to work.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, responded lengthily on X:

First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.

But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so 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. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.

More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don’t show you ads.)

Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.

Altman going for the “man of the people” angle doesn’t come as a surprise to me, but it’s highly disingenuous. ChatGPT is a widely used product, not because it’s the best, but because it was the first. That’s fine — normal, even — but Anthropic doesn’t serve an expensive product “to rich people.” It serves a better, more reliable product to programmers, scientists, and researchers, many of whom can justify the added expense to increase their productivity. Altman frames Claude as a luxury product, whereas ChatGPT is a necessity for people, which must remain free for public benefit. That’s an absurd assertion — all artificial intelligence chatbots are luxury products. The cheapest way to write code is to write it yourself.

Claude’s advertisement works because Claude knows who it’s catering to: business customers. And businesses are always where the money is — just ask airlines, whose frequent flier programs are the only thing keeping their planes in the sky. Microsoft is a glorified business-to-business software-as-a-service corporation. OpenAI has largely been unsuccessful at pivoting from consumer to business because Codex is worse than Claude Code, and Anthropic’s models are more accurate, tasteful, and communicate better. Anthropic is objectively ahead of OpenAI, and Claude Opus 4.5 has broken through to the industry in a way only the original version of ChatGPT did in 2022.

As I wrote previously, OpenAI’s pivot to advertising is a last-ditch effort to make a flashy initial public offering happen. The company is hemorrhaging money — Anthropic is not. The difference between the two companies is that one has successfully marketed to business users (“frequent fliers,” not just corporations) while the other is stagnating in an unprofitable consumer market. What’s a given in Silicon Valley is that businesses subsidize consumers — billions of dollars in Microsoft 365 Enterprise contracts allow Microsoft to offer a free version of Word on the web to everyone, with no advertising. That doesn’t make Microsoft a “premium product” compared to, say, Google Docs, but it does highlight a difference in business models.

It appears to me that Altman is just salty — jealous, maybe — that Anthropic has broken through to businesses to such a high degree. Nobody talks about Codex anymore because it’s just not as good as Claude Code. By Altman’s own admission, OpenAI doesn’t want to become an advertising company, but because it has lost the business of such an important part of the market, its hand is forced. This doesn’t make Altman’s company altruistic — it’s a business necessity to stay afloat. Any posturing to the contrary is disingenuous, unlike Anthropic’s ads, which I think will do surprisingly well on Sunday.