On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released 4 commercials, two of which can run in the course of the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the thought of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic’s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.
Altman called Anthropic’s ads “clearly dishonest,” accused the corporate of being “authoritarian,” and said it “serves an expensive product to wealthy people,” while Rouch wrote, “Real betrayal isn’t ads. It’s control.”
Anthropic’s 4 commercials, a part of a campaign called “A Time and a Place,” each open with a single word splashed across the screen: “Betrayal,” “Violation,” “Deception,” and “Treachery.” They depict scenarios where an individual asks a human stand-in for an AI chatbot for private advice, only to get blindsided by a product pitch.
Anthropic’s 2026 Super Bowl business.
In a single spot, a person asks a therapist-style chatbot (a girl sitting in a chair) the way to communicate higher along with his mom. The bot offers a couple of suggestions, then pivots to promoting a fictional cougar-dating site called Golden Encounters.
In one other spot, a thin man in search of fitness suggestions as a substitute gets served an ad for height-boosting insoles. Each ad ends with the tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But to not Claude.” Anthropic plans to air a 30-second version during Super Bowl LX, with a 60-second cut running within the pregame, according to CNBC.
Within the X posts, the OpenAI executives argue that these commercials are misleading since the planned ChatGPT ads will appear labeled at the underside of conversational responses in banners and is not going to alter the chatbot’s answers.
But there’s a slight twist: OpenAI’s own blog post about its ad plans states that the corporate will “test ads at the underside of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored services or products based in your current conversation,” meaning the ads shall be conversation-specific.
The financial backdrop explains a few of the tension over ads in chatbots. As Ars previously reported, OpenAI struck greater than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals in 2025 and expects to burn roughly $9 billion this 12 months while generating about $13 billion in revenue. Only about 5 percent of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users pay for subscriptions. Anthropic can be not yet profitable, nevertheless it relies on enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions relatively than promoting, and it has not taken on infrastructure commitments at the identical scale as OpenAI.
