A mere two years ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the idea of stuffing his company’s blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT with ads as a “last resort.” But as the company recently announced, users will be pestered by ads after all — an early sign of desperation as the company continues to lose billions of dollars every quarter.
The decision hasn’t sat well with insiders. This week, OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig declared in a New York Times essay that she was resigning from the company.
“I don’t believe ads are immoral or unethical,” she wrote. “AI is expensive to run, and ads can be a critical source of revenue. But I have deep reservations about OpenAI’s strategy.”
Hitzig argued that the risks of OpenAI exploiting its userbase with insidious advertisements were simply too steep.
“People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems and their beliefs about God and the afterlife,” Hitzig argued. “Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.”
While she wasn’t worried about the first generation of ads, which will be “clearly labeled” and “appear at the bottom of answers,” Hitzig is worried that subsequent iterations won’t “follow those principles.”
She compared OpenAI to Facebook, which once promised that users would maintain control over their data — a principle that was abandoned early on, in dramatic fashion.
“So the real question is not ads or no ads,” she wrote. “It is whether we can design structures that avoid excluding people from these tools and potentially manipulating them as consumers. I think we can.”
The subject hit a fever pitch over the weekend, when OpenAI competitor Anthropic aired several ads that claimed “ads are coming to AI,” but not to its chatbot Claude — without ever naming OpenAI directly — which sent Altman spiraling. He called the ads “dishonest” and accused the company of “doublespeak,” but whether there’s any truth to Anthropic’s ill-fated vision of the future remains to be seen as OpenAI works out how to implement ads.
We’ve seen other highly publicized departures from the Altman-led company over the last year, including economics researcher Tom Cunningham, who left after reportedly voicing concerns over AI being bad for the economy — warnings that could ultimately be prophetic.
Former OpenAI engineer Calvin French-Owen, who helped build the company’s coding agent Codex, also quit in July, painting a picture of corporate chaos behind the scenes.
Hitzig’s departure comes on the heels of Platformer reporting that OpenAI had disbanded its mission alignment team, which was created in 2024 to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
Instead, the former team’s lead, Joshua Achiam, reportedly took on the role of “chief futurist” at OpenAI.
Hitzig is only the latest in a series of high-profile departures. On Monday, Anthropic researcher Mrinank Sharma announced his resignation after posting a cryptic letter on X that was painfully devoid of specifics, but highlighted concerns over the safety of the tech being developed by the Claude chatbot maker.
“We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences,” he wrote.
At least half of Elon Musk’s xAI’s 12 cofounders have also now quit. Earlier this week, two of them publicly announced their resignation within just 24 hours.
Neither of them made any mention of safety concerns, suggesting the departures weren’t a matter of principle. That’s despite the company’s chatbot Grok being tied up in a growing scandal over the dissemination of deepfake pornography and child sexual abuse material (CSAM.)
In short, all three companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — are seeing a steady outflow of talent, right at the moment when they seem most desperate for a business model.
More on AI company departures: Anthropic Researcher Quits in Cryptic Public Letter
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