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.
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