‘We are not stupid’: Sam Altman responds after Anthropic’s Super Bowl jab on ads in ChatGPT

ChatGPT

• Anthropic's Super Bowl ads mocked AI chatbot ads, targeting ChatGPT.
• OpenAI CEO Altman criticized Anthropic's ads, defended ChatGPT's ad strategy.
• Both companies offer free and paid tiers, but differ on ad and content policies.

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Anthropic made an unusually bold marketing play during the Super Bowl, releasing a set of commercials that openly mocked the idea of advertising inside AI chatbots. One spot opens with the word “BETRAYAL” filling the screen, before showing a man seeking advice from a chatbot clearly meant to resemble ChatGPT. What begins as gentle, earnest guidance quickly veers into a parody ad for a fictional cougar-dating service, undercutting the trust users place in AI assistants.

Another ad follows a similar formula. A young man asks for help building a six-pack, supplying his age, height and weight, only for the chatbot to serve him an ad for height-boosting insoles. Anthropic closes both spots by promising that while ads may be coming to AI, they will not be coming to Claude.

The message was unmistakable. The ads landed just weeks after OpenAI confirmed it plans to introduce advertising to ChatGPT’s free tier, and headlines quickly framed the campaign as Anthropic “dunking on” or “skewering” its larger rival. The humour was sharp enough that even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted on X that he laughed. What followed suggested the joke hit closer to home than he was willing to admit.

'Dishonest', 'authoritarian': Altman fires back

Altman responded with a long post accusing Anthropic of being dishonest and misleading users about how ChatGPT ads will work. He argued that advertising is necessary to subsidise free access for millions of users and insisted that OpenAI would never manipulate a conversation to insert ads in the way shown in the commercials. OpenAI has said ads will be clearly labelled, separate from chat responses, and will not influence the model’s behaviour.

"But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. 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. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that," said Altman in the post.

At the same time, OpenAI has acknowledged that ads will be contextually relevant. As the company explained in a blog post, it plans to test sponsored placements at the bottom of answers when a product or service relates to the ongoing conversation. That overlap sits at the heart of Anthropic’s critique, even if the ads exaggerate the effect for comic impact.

Altman went further, accusing Anthropic of serving “rich people” with expensive products and of wanting to control how AI is used. In practice, both companies offer free tiers and a broadly similar spread of paid plans. Both enforce usage policies and guardrails, though they draw different lines on issues such as sexual content and code usage.

Altman’s most striking claim was that Anthropic is “authoritarian”, language that felt disproportionate to a dispute sparked by a cheeky ad campaign. In a world where that term carries real political and human consequences, its use in a corporate spat over marketing and monetisation stood out.

Rivalries in tech have long been fought through advertising, but Anthropic’s Super Bowl spots touched a nerve by questioning trust at a moment when AI companies are asking users to accept new trade-offs. Judging by the reaction, the ads did exactly what they were designed to do.