Anthropic is taking a shot at OpenAI on the biggest stage possible.
On Wednesday, Anthropic rolled out a glitzy ad campaign that will air nationally during Sunday’s Super Bowl, which implicitly centers on OpenAI’s plans to bring advertising to ChatGPT.
“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” the tag line reads.
The declaration shows that Anthropic is willing to draw a line in the sand with its no-AI-ads-in-chatbots stance. But the move also means Anthropic is declining to pursue a potentially key revenue stream for Claude at a time when AI companies are spending more than ever in the AI race.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he laughed at the ads, but questioned their “clearly dishonest portrayal” of what OpenAI plans to do.
“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 wrote Wednesday afternoon in a lengthy post on X. “We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.”
Altman said that OpenAI would have its own Super Bowl ad. “It’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything,” he said.
With much of Anthropic’s revenue coming from its enterprise business, the company may feel it’s a worthwhile tradeoff and a way to further differentiate its offerings from OpenAI’s.
Anthropic has booked a 30-second spot during the game and an additional 1-minute ad during the pregame for what is historically the most-watched live television event in the US.
The 30-second spot features a scrawny guy asking a buffed trainer, “Can I get a six pack quickly?” While at first the trainer gives helpful information in the voice of an AI chatbot, the trainer quickly segues into an ad.
“Confidence isn’t just built in the gym, try Step Boost Max, the insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help short kings stand tall,” the trainer says.
Anthropic’s 1-minute-long spot is even more provocative. It features an adult man in therapy who is trying to connect more with his mother. After giving some general advice, the AI chatbot-like voice segues into an ad for a fictional dating service for younger men seeking older women.
“If the relationship can’t be fixed, find an emotional connection with other older women on Golden Encounters, the mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars,” the therapist responds in the voice of a chatbot.
Two additional ads in the campaign feature a woman in a restaurant asking for feedback on a new business idea and a student asking a professor for help with an essay.
It’s not immediately clear how much Anthropic is spending on the Super Bowl campaign. Mike Marshall, head of global advertising for NBCUniversal, whose network has the rights to this year’s game, recently said a 30-second spot costs roughly $8 million.
OpenAI’s embrace of chatbot ads
Last month, OpenAI announced plans to begin testing ads in the US for its free and Go tiers of ChatGPT. While anticipated, the announcement illustrated just how much Altman has changed his views on monetizing the chatbot with ads.
“Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” Altman said during an event at Harvard University in May 2024. “I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model.”
As part of the announcement, OpenAI said that ads would “not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.”
“Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you,” the company said in the announcement. “Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.”
In case the ad campaign wasn’t clear enough, Anthropic released its own lengthy statement pledging to keep ads off of Claude.
“Ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Anthropic, founded by seven former OpenAI employees, including CEO Dario Amodei, has also repeatedly shown it’s not above taking implicit shots at its rival, though the Super Bowl ads represent an escalation of the AI wars.
In December, Amodei poked fun at companies that declare “Code Reds,” denounced others that are “Yoloing” by making risky bets on future AI demand, and extolled the virtues of Anthropic’s business model, built on the enterprise market. Individually and collectively, the remarks came across as implicit shots at OpenAI, though Amodei repeatedly declined to name his target.
When asked, “who is Yoloing,” Amodei responded, “So that’s not a question I’m going to answer.”
And while Anthropic still isn’t naming names, the target of their taunts will be hard for Super Bowl fans to ignore.
