Battle of the AI Brands: OpenAI and Anthropic's Ad War

OpenAI and Anthropic went head to head in the build-up to this year's Super Bowl over a divisive topic: advertising. 

Each firm has been clear in recent days with regards to its position. OpenAI is 'for' ads in its flagship product, ChatGPT, while Anthropic stands firmly 'against' ads in Claude.

The pair have made strong statements on where they stand, with the latter even launching a series of commercials taking aim at its big rival, which has begun testing in the US ready for more widespread rollout. 

One of Anthropic's adverts features a conversation between a woman (the AI user) and an AI agent personified. The agent is responding to the woman's question when an "out of character" feature suddenly interrupts, confusing the user. 

Claude vs ChatGPT

All four of Anthropic's ads – released last week – end with the same tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." 

However, OpenAI insists ads will be clearly separated from the actual responses of AI agents.

"Ads will be clearly labelled and separated from the organic answer," OpenAI said in a statement. "You'll be able to learn more about why you're seeing that ad, or dismiss any ad and tell us why."

It adds that, during the testing phase, ads will not appear under "sensitive or regulated topics" such as "health, mental health or politics, or for anyone the platform predicts or knows the user is under 18". 

Accessibility or disruption?

OpenAI says its decision to introduce advertising to ChatGPT is designed to "make AI more accessible" – despite the existence of a free version accessible to all. 

Anthropic refutes this suggestion, dismissing ads as disruptive: "Including 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.

"There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them."

OpenAI's CEO bites back

Designed to coincide with Super Bowl Sunday, the US' biggest night of the year for advertising, Anthropic's ads were labelled "deceptive" and "clearly dishonest" by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Writing on X, he said: "I guess it's on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.

"Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. 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."

Anthropic offers a free plan for Claude, as well as a paid version. 

Anthropic stands its ground

Despite the subtext, Anthropic does not explicitly mention OpenAI or ChatGPT in any of its ads.

Speaking on Good Morning America, Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder and President at Anthropic, said the commercials weren't targeted at OpenAI or "any other company other than us".

However, in a separate interview with CNBC, she added: "Anthropic has always had a fraction of what our competitors have had in terms of compute and capital, and yet, pretty consistently, we’ve had the most powerful, most performant models for the majority of the past several years."

Expert analysis

Experts and analysts have asserted that ChatGPT may struggle to retain users in the event of ads being introduced.

Darren Silverman, who serves as VP Marketing at Petmate, says: "I think they [ads] will be largely ignorable in the beginning, but we know that will change! 

"I would be aggravated if an ad dropped right into my chat, which I am sure is coming at some point."

However, Kiri Masters, a prominent retail media industry analyst, disagrees: "My take: we've made this bargain everywhere else. It's free. We've come to accept, for better or worse, that when something is free, we are the product.

"Copilot has been runnings ads in chat since day one and they're still going. The utility outweighs the function."

Many see ads as the implicit price of free AI, while others fear they will eventually be inserted directly into conversations.

Ultimately, the retention of users will hinge on execution: how restrained the rollout is and the extent to which ads intrude on chatbot conversations.