Anthropic spent the Super Bowl on Sunday night slamming OpenAI for planning to introduce ads to ChatGPT through a series of tongue-in-cheek ads. Then, only hours later, ChatGPT officially unveiled ads.
Starting on Monday, logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers will begin seeing test ads in ChatGPT, while other paid subscriptions will be spared, at least for now.
“Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers,” OpenAI said in a press release, but what ads you get will be influenced by your past chats. “We’re starting with a test to learn, listen, and make sure we get the experience right.”
For days now, the internet has been buzzing about four ads Anthropic launched for the Super Bowl. Each ad includes a different person consulting a personified AI chatbot, only to be met with weird and, at times, inappropriate ads disguised as advice. The ads all end with “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
It was a clear dig at OpenAI, which first officially teased an ads business model for ChatGPT in an internal “code red” memo back in December.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the Anthropic ads on Twitter last week, calling them “funny” but “clearly dishonest.”
“We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them,” Altman wrote. He claimed that an ads business would make the free ChatGPT offering financially sustainable for the business, which is still facing an uncertain road to profitability. Those who pay for a ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscription won’t be shown any ads.
“More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do,” Altman wrote, before going on to accuse Anthropic of serving “an expensive product to rich people” (Anthropic does also have a free Claude offering) and wanting “to control what people do with AI.”
“Now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be,” Altman said.
OpenAI and Anthropic rarely see eye to eye. Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei are both former OpenAI employees who don’t refrain from taking public jabs at their former employer. Dario Amodei is also prone to evangelizing about the risks of AI superintelligence, while Altman has taken a relatively more excited approach to the idea. OpenAI and Anthropic employees also reportedly back two super PACs completely at odds on AI regulation. Now it seems we can add chatbot ads to this list of disagreements as well.
Ads in ChatGPT will be “clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated” from the answer, OpenAI said.
There are also allegedly some safeguards in place, in that even though the ads will be targeted to you based on your chat history, the advertisers won’t have access to it, and the ads won’t appear near “sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health or politics.”
But even ads that don’t influence responses or appear separately within safeguards seem too much for Anthropic.
“Such ads would also introduce an incentive to optimize for engagement—for the amount of time people spend using Claude and how often they return. These metrics aren’t necessarily aligned with being genuinely helpful,” Anthropic wrote in a press release last week.
Even opt-in ad approaches risk expanding over time, Anthropic argues.
“The most useful AI interaction might be a short one, or one that resolves the user’s request without prompting further conversation,” Anthropic said.
The inclusion of ads is a notable shift in Altman’s thinking. Before company executives began toying with the idea, Altman once described “ads-plus-AI” as a “last resort,” and “sort of uniquely unsettling.”
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