Anthropic Super Bowl Ad Targets OpenAI’s Advertising Plan

Anthropic is reportedly spending millions on a Super Bowl ad criticizing rival OpenAI .

The ad during Sunday’s (Feb. 8) football championship slam’s OpenAI’s plan to sell advertisements on its ChatGPT chatbot, Reuters reported , characterizing the move as one of the largest public disputes between the big AI startups.

In the commercial, a skinny young man does pull-ups in a park, and asks fitness advice from a more muscular bystander. This man replies in a robotic fashion, hinting that this is a chatbot, and offers a personalized strength-training plan, as well as an ad for shoe inserts that help “short kings stand tall.”

And then the stinger: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” referring to Anthropic’s chatbot. The ad comes days after Anthropic said Claude would remain ad-free.

According to Reuters, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was unamused, calling the Anthropic commercial “deceptive” in a social media post.

“We’re not stupid,” Altman told the TBPN podcast Thursday (Feb. 5). “We respect our users, we understand that if we did something like what those ads depict, people will rightfully stop using our product.”

For its part, OpenAI will run a Super Bowl ad promoting its Codex software coding tool .

This will be Claude’s Super Bowl debut, the report added, with both companies vying for the attention of some 120 million people expected to watch the big game .

OpenAI has said it plans to test ads in ChatGPT, starting in the U.S. on the Free and Go tiers. The company aims to position these ads to sit below answers at the bottom of the user interface. They will also be clearly labeled and relate to the live conversation at hand.

“This signals that as the industry’s economics tighten — with free usage exploding and massive infrastructure and operating costs — even the AI leader is shifting to a model that looks more like a content business,” PYMNTS wrote.

Other tech companies are moving in a similar direction. Meta , for example, has begun treating interactions with Meta AI as personalization data points that can shape the ads and content users encounter across in the company’s other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

“Ads are not a guaranteed revenue machine, though,” that report added. “ Perplexity recently suspended the model it introduced in late 2024 of running sponsored follow-up questions — ads that flow into a user’s ongoing query. This approach appears to have failed or at least to have risked turning off too many users.”