OpenAI is hoppin’ mad about Anthropic’s new Super Bowl TV ads

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic’s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.

Altman called Anthropic’s ads “clearly dishonest,” accused the company of being “authoritarian,” and said it “serves an expensive product to rich people,” while Rouch wrote, “Real betrayal isn’t ads. It’s control.”

Anthropic’s four commercials, part of a campaign called “A Time and a Place,” each open with a single word splashed across the screen: “Betrayal,” “Violation,” “Deception,” and “Treachery.” They depict scenarios where a person asks a human stand-in for an AI chatbot for personal advice, only to get blindsided by a product pitch.

In one spot, a man asks a therapist-style chatbot (a woman sitting in a chair) how to communicate better with his mom. The bot offers a few suggestions, then pivots to promoting a fictional cougar-dating site called Golden Encounters.

In another spot, a skinny man looking for fitness tips instead gets served an ad for height-boosting insoles. Each ad ends with the tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Anthropic plans to air a 30-second version during Super Bowl LX, with a 60-second cut running in the pregame, according to CNBC.

In the X posts, the OpenAI executives argue that these commercials are misleading because the planned ChatGPT ads will appear labeled at the bottom of conversational responses in banners and will not alter the chatbot’s answers.

But there’s a slight twist: OpenAI’s own blog post about its ad plans states that the company will “test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation,” meaning the ads will be conversation-specific.

The financial backdrop explains some of the tension over ads in chatbots. As Ars previously reported, OpenAI struck more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals in 2025 and expects to burn roughly $9 billion this year while generating about $13 billion in revenue. Only about 5 percent of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users pay for subscriptions. Anthropic is also not yet profitable, but it relies on enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions rather than advertising, and it has not taken on infrastructure commitments at the same scale as OpenAI.

Three OpenAI leaders weigh in

Competition between Anthropic and OpenAI is especially testy because several OpenAI employees left the company to found Anthropic in 2021. Currently, Anthropic’s Claude Code has pulled off something of a market upset, becoming a favorite among some software developers despite the company’s much smaller overall market share among chatbot users.

Altman opened his lengthy post on X by granting that the ads were “funny” and that he “laughed.” But then the tone shifted. “I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest,” he wrote. “We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.”

He went further: “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.”

Altman framed the dispute as a fight over access. “More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently shaped problem than they do,” he wrote. He then accused Anthropic of overreach: “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI,” adding that Anthropic blocks “companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us).” He closed with: “One authoritarian company won’t get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.”

OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch posted a response, calling the ads “funny” before pivoting. “Anthropic thinks powerful AI should be tightly controlled in small rooms in San Francisco and Davos,” she wrote. “That it’s too DANGEROUS for you.”

Anthropic’s post declaring Claude ad-free does hedge a bit, however. “Should we need to revisit this approach, we’ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so,” Anthropic wrote.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman pointed this out on X, asking Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei directly whether he would “commit to never selling Claude’s ‘users’ attention or data to advertisers,’” calling it a “genuine question” and noting that Anthropic’s blog post “makes it sound like you’re keeping the option open.”