Anthropic seemed to have surprised OpenAI with its somewhat direct attacks through its Super Bowl ads, but OpenAI is in no mood to take things lying down.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a sharp rebuke to Anthropic’s Super Bowl commercials, which depicted AI assistants inserting jarring advertisements into sensitive conversations and ended with the tagline “Ads are coming to AI. But not Claude.” In a lengthy post on X, Altman called the ads “clearly dishonest” and accused Anthropic of misrepresenting how OpenAI plans to implement advertising in ChatGPT.
Altman’s Response
“First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed,” Altman began. “But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest.”
Altman emphasized that OpenAI’s advertising principles explicitly prevent the kind of intrusive, response-altering ads depicted in Anthropic’s commercials. “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.”
He characterized the campaign as hypocritical: “I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.”
The Access Argument
Altman then pivoted to what he framed as a fundamental philosophical difference between the two companies: accessibility versus exclusivity.
“More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency,” Altman stated. “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.)”
He argued that Anthropic’s business model serves a narrow demographic: “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.”
Broader Criticism
Altman expanded his critique beyond the advertising question to attack what he characterized as Anthropic’s controlling approach to AI development.
“Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—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,” he wrote. Anthropic has blocked access to its coding tools for both OpenAI and xAI, two companies it sees as rivals in the AI race. (Google DeepMind, which holds an estimated 7% stake in Anthropic, appears to still have access).
He positioned OpenAI as championing openness: “We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI.”
Altman warned against concentration of AI power: “We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won’t get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.”
The Codex Counter-Punch
Altman concluded by pivoting to OpenAI’s own product announcements, particularly Codex, its coding tool. “As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything,” he wrote.
“We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win.”
He ended with a rallying cry: “We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.”
The Bigger Picture
Altman may have a point about the sustainability and equity implications of AI business models. For technology to become truly mainstream and accessible to everyone regardless of economic status, it needs a viable revenue source. As the past three decades of internet history have demonstrated, advertising has proven to be the most effective mechanism for subsidizing free access to powerful digital tools—from search engines to social media to email.
Anthropic has the luxury of maintaining an ad-free product in part because its consumer chatbot user base remains tiny compared to ChatGPT’s massive scale. With OpenAI reporting 800 million ChatGPT users, the cost of providing free access without advertising revenue is exponentially higher than what Anthropic faces. The economic realities of serving hundreds of millions of free users create different pressures and require different solutions.
Whether OpenAI’s implementation of advertising will live up to Altman’s promises—or whether it will gradually evolve into something closer to what Anthropic’s ads depicted—remains to be seen. But the fundamental tension he identified is real: without advertising or other revenue sources, truly universal access to advanced AI may prove economically unsustainable.