In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the possibility that his company would ever have to stuff ads into its chatbots, painting it as a desperate move he called a “last resort for us as a business model.”
As it turns out, the billionaire may have overestimated how much people were willing to shell out every month to access ChatGPT. Paid subscriber growth has slowed in key markets as OpenAI continues to burn billions of dollars every quarter, further stoking concerns over the company’s potential inability to turn things around before it’s too late.
And as the competition at Anthropic and Google continued to make massive strides in their efforts to catch up, Altman declared an internal “code red,” announcing late last year that ChatGPT was getting ads after all.
OpenAI’s competitors saw the reversal as a golden opportunity to strike. Anthropic released a series of Super Bowl ads this week that openly skewer Altman’s compromise on ads — without ever naming the company outright, cleverly — in a bid to strike a chord with users who aren’t thrilled about an ad-packed chatbot experience.
“Ads are coming to AI.” the ads’ tagline reads. “But not to Claude.”
It’s always a bad sign when someone insists that they’re not mad and actually laughing. So when Altman declared on X that he thinks the ads are “funny” and that he “laughed” — before posting a lengthy screed about how they’re horribly unfair — it was an unintentional masterclass in corporate insecurity.
“But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest,” he wrote. “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.”
Altman also angrily accused the company of “doublespeak” and using a “deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real.”
The CEO also called users who shell out $20 a month for a Claude subscription “rich people” — a bizarre characterization, especially given his multibillion-dollar net worth.
“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 wrote.
He also accused Anthropic of trying to become an “authoritarian company” that wants to “control what people do with AI,” even though there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that he’s the pot calling the kettle black.
It’s a messy and unusually public blowout that highlights how the AI race, once fought in board rooms behind closed doors and through carefully worded press releases, is entering the public consciousness.
Altman’s frustration perfectly illustrates how AI companies have driven themselves into a corner. Either they can charge a hefty monthly fee to cut their losses and reassure spooked investors that they can, in fact, deliver revenues on their balance sheets — or scare away users through annoying ads, like every generation of new platform before them.
While OpenAI hasn’t yet settled on a way to implement ads for its blockbuster chatbot, an early screenshot the company showed off during its announcement late last year indicates that free-tier users will likely be painfully aware that the company is trying to sell them something. The shown example ad covers a significant chunk — almost half — of the mobile screen.
It remains to be seen how users will react once the ads go live. Will they immediately flock to an ad-free competitor, like Claude or Google’s Gemini, or will they be willing to stick it out to avoid paying more than what they pay for Netflix every month?
The AI race is bound to drag on as companies like OpenAI will continue to desperately convince their customers and investors that their existence — and enormous spending — is justified and that their tech is worth the hassle in the first place. Given the recent tech selloffs and nervousness among investors and diminishing performance gains with each new AI model release, that seems to still be an open question.
In short, Altman may say he was amused by Anthropic’s latest slight, but given his heated rhetoric, the gloves are starting to come off.
“‘I laughed, until I didn’t.’” one Reddit user joked.
More on Altman: Sam Altman Says Oops, They Accidentally Made the New Version of ChatGPT Worse Than the Previous One
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