Credit: Anthropic

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced that its AI chatbot, Claude, will remain free of advertisements, drawing a sharp line between itself and rival OpenAI, which began testing ads in a low-cost tier of ChatGPT last month. The announcement comes alongside a Super Bowl ad campaign that mocks AI assistants that interrupt personal conversations with product pitches.

“There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post. The company argued that including ads in AI conversations would be “incompatible” with what it wants Claude to be: “a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.”

The stance contrasts with OpenAI’s January announcement that it would begin testing banner ads for free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the US. OpenAI said those ads would appear at the bottom of responses and would not influence the chatbot’s actual answers. Paid subscribers on Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers will not see ads on ChatGPT.

“We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests,” Anthropic wrote. “So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see ‘sponsored’ links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.”

Competition between OpenAI and Anthropic has been fierce of late, due to the rise of AI coding agents. Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding tool, and OpenAI’s Codex have similar capabilities, but Claude Code has been widely popular among developers and is closing in on OpenAI’s turf. Last month, The Verge reported that many developers inside long-time OpenAI benefactor Microsoft have been adopting Claude Code, choosing Anthropic products over Microsoft’s Copilot, which is powered by tech that originated at OpenAI.

In this climate, Anthropic could not resist taking a dig at OpenAI. In its Super Bowl commercial, we see a thin man struggling to do a pull-up beside a buff fitness instructor, who is a stand-in for an AI assistant. The man asks the “assistant” for help making a workout plan, but the assistant slips in an advertisement for a supplement, confusing the man. The commercial doesn’t name any names, and OpenAI has said it will not include ads in chat text itself, but Anthropic’s implications are clear.

Different incentives, different futures

In its blog post, Anthropic describes internal analysis it conducted that suggests many Claude conversations involve topics that are “sensitive or deeply personal” or require sustained focus on complex tasks. In these contexts, Anthropic wrote, “The appearance of ads would feel incongruous—and, in many cases, inappropriate.”

The company also argued that advertising introduces incentives that could conflict with providing genuinely helpful advice. It gave the example of a user mentioning trouble sleeping: an ad-free assistant would explore various causes, while an ad-supported one might steer the conversation toward a transaction.

“Users shouldn’t have to second-guess whether an AI is genuinely helping them or subtly steering the conversation towards something monetizable,” Anthropic wrote.

Currently, OpenAI does not plan to include paid product recommendations within a ChatGPT conversation. Instead, the ads appear as banners alongside the conversation text.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously expressed reservations about mixing ads and AI conversations. In a 2024 interview at Harvard University, he described the combination as “uniquely unsettling” and said he would not like having to “figure out exactly how much was who paying here to influence what I’m being shown.”

A key part of Altman’s partial change of heart is that OpenAI faces enormous financial pressure. The company made more than $1.4 trillion worth of infrastructure deals in 2025, and according to documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal, it expects to burn through roughly $9 billion this year while generating $13 billion in revenue. Only about 5 percent of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users pay for subscriptions.

Much like OpenAI, Anthropic is not yet profitable, but it is expected to get there much faster. Anthropic has not attempted to span the world with massive datacenters, and its business model largely relies on enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions. The company says Claude Code and Cowork have already brought in at least $1 billion in revenue, according to Axios.

“Our business model is straightforward,” Anthropic wrote. “This is a choice with tradeoffs, and we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions.”