The gloves appear to have come off between OpenAI and Anthropic after the Claude maker aired a television ad that seems to mock ChatGPT’s new push toward in-chat advertising.
Outlining its stance in a blog post on Wednesday, February 4, Anthropic said that its Claude AI chatbot will remain ad-free. Users will not see sponsored links within the Claude chat window and the chatbot’s responses will never be influenced by advertisers or feature product placements, the ChatGPT rival said.
“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,” Anthropic added.
As Anthropic’s ad taking aim at OpenAI circulated on social media, CEO Sam Altman responded by calling it “dishonest” and “doublespeak” that was “on brand for Anthropic”. “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,” Altman said in a post on X.
First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.
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…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026
Last month, OpenAI announced that it will be showing ads within ChatGPT to users in the United States as part of initial trials before expanding globally. As part of its rules governing ChatGPT ads, OpenAI said it will not share user conversations with advertisers and more importantly, not allow ads to influence ChatGPT’s responses to user queries.
The swipes exchanged between OpenAI and Anthropic come at a time when the business models of AI companies have come under growing scrutiny from investors and market observers. Fears over the lack of a viable monetisation path for most AI giants have also fuelled concerns about an AI market bubble and what would happen if it bursts. OpenAI, in particular, has been questioned about its trillion-dollar infrastructure commitments and how it plans to bankroll such projects.
Why is Anthropic against ads in Claude?
Besides OpenAI, Google Search has also introduced ads in AI Overviews and is testing ads in AI Mode. However, Anthropic has said that ads in search results and within chatbot conversations have different implications for users.
“Conversations with AI assistants are meaningfully different. The format is open-ended; users often share context and reveal more than they would in a search query. This openness is part of what makes conversations with AI valuable, but it’s also what makes them susceptible to influence in ways that other digital products are not,” Anthropic said.
Story continues below this ad
It argued that advertising introduces incentives which add another level of complexity to how AI models behave. “Our understanding of how models translate the goals we set them into specific behaviors is still developing; an ad-based system could therefore have unpredictable results,” Anthropic added.
It further said that showing ads to users within Claude would violate the principles laid out in its recently published ‘Constitution’. Even ads that do not directly influence an AI model’s responses and appear separately within the chat window will introduce an incentive to optimise for engagement, Anthropic argued.
How does Anthropic make money?
Anthropic’s competitive edge in the fierce AI race could be defined as an enterprise-first model provider since much of the startup’s revenue comes from other companies paying to integrate its Claude, Sonnet, and Opus series of models into workflows, products, and internal systems.
Claude Code, launched in June 2025, has quickly become one of the most popular command-line programming tools. In Wednesday’s post, Anthropic said its business model comes down to generating revenue through enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions, and reinvesting that revenue into improving Claude for users. The company also said it is open to rolling out “lower-cost subscription tiers and regional pricing where there is clear demand for it.”
Story continues below this ad
Meanwhile, Altman accused Anthropic of only building products that cater to “rich people”. “More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do […] Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us),” the OpenAI chief said on X.
