The gloves seem to have come off between OpenAI and Anthropic after the Claude maker aired a tv advert that appears to mock ChatGPT’s new push towards in-chat promoting.
Outlining its stance in a weblog put up on Wednesday, February 4, Anthropic stated that its Claude AI chatbot will stay ad-free. Customers won’t see sponsored hyperlinks inside the Claude chat window and the chatbot’s responses won’t ever be influenced by advertisers or characteristic product placements, the ChatGPT rival stated.
“Together with adverts in conversations with Claude can be incompatible with what we wish Claude to be: a genuinely useful assistant for work and for deep considering,” Anthropic added.
As Anthropic’s advert taking purpose at OpenAI circulated on social media, CEO Sam Altman responded by calling it “dishonest” and “doublespeak” that was “on model for Anthropic”. “Our most necessary precept for adverts says that we received’t do precisely this; we’d clearly by no means run adverts in the best way Anthropic depicts them. We’re not silly and we all know our customers would reject that,” Altman stated in a put up on X.
First, the great a part of the Anthropic adverts: they’re humorous, and I laughed.
However I’m wondering why Anthropic would go for one thing so clearly dishonest. Our most necessary precept for adverts says that we received’t do precisely this; we’d clearly by no means run adverts in the best way Anthropic…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026
Final month, OpenAI introduced that it will likely be displaying adverts inside ChatGPT to customers in america as a part of preliminary trials earlier than increasing globally. As a part of its guidelines governing ChatGPT adverts, OpenAI stated it won’t share consumer conversations with advertisers and extra importantly, not enable adverts to affect ChatGPT’s responses to consumer queries.
The swipes exchanged between OpenAI and Anthropic come at a time when the enterprise fashions of AI firms have come underneath rising scrutiny from traders and market observers. Fears over the dearth of a viable monetisation path for many AI giants have additionally fuelled considerations about an AI market bubble and what would occur if it bursts. OpenAI, specifically, has been questioned about its trillion-dollar infrastructure commitments and the way it plans to bankroll such initiatives.
Why is Anthropic in opposition to adverts in Claude?
Apart from OpenAI, Google Search has additionally launched adverts in AI Overviews and is testing adverts in AI Mode. Nonetheless, Anthropic has stated that adverts in search outcomes and inside chatbot conversations have totally different implications for customers.
“Conversations with AI assistants are meaningfully totally different. The format is open-ended; customers typically share context and reveal greater than they might in a search question. This openness is a part of what makes conversations with AI beneficial, but it surely’s additionally what makes them inclined to affect in ways in which different digital merchandise usually are not,” Anthropic stated.
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It argued that promoting introduces incentives which add one other stage of complexity to how AI fashions behave. “Our understanding of how fashions translate the targets we set them into particular behaviors continues to be growing; an ad-based system might due to this fact have unpredictable outcomes,” Anthropic added.
It additional stated that displaying adverts to customers inside Claude would violate the rules specified by its lately revealed ‘Structure’. Even adverts that don’t immediately affect an AI mannequin’s responses and seem individually inside the chat window will introduce an incentive to optimise for engagement, Anthropic argued.
How does Anthropic generate profits?
Anthropic’s aggressive edge within the fierce AI race could possibly be outlined as an enterprise-first mannequin supplier since a lot of the startup’s income comes from different firms paying to combine its Claude, Sonnet, and Opus collection of fashions into workflows, merchandise, and inner programs.
Claude Code, launched in June 2025, has rapidly turn out to be some of the well-liked command-line programming instruments. In Wednesday’s put up, Anthropic stated its enterprise mannequin comes all the way down to producing income by way of enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions, and reinvesting that income into bettering Claude for customers. The corporate additionally stated it’s open to rolling out “lower-cost subscription tiers and regional pricing the place there’s clear demand for it.”
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In the meantime, Altman accused Anthropic of solely constructing merchandise that cater to “wealthy folks”. “Extra Texans use ChatGPT without cost than complete folks use Claude within the US, so now we have a differently-shaped drawback than they do […] Anthropic needs to manage what folks do with AI—they block firms they don’t like from utilizing their coding product (together with us),” the OpenAI chief stated on X.