Anthropic doubles down on ad-free model, takes shot at OpenAI in upcoming Super Bowl ad

Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) on Wednesday doubled down on its commitment to keep ads out of its chatbot, Claude, and revealed a suite of new ads ahead of the Super Bowl that will poke fun at its main rival, OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).

In mid-January, OpenAI announced plans to begin testing ads with some users in its flagship product, ChatGPT, as it ramps up monetization efforts.

“There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them,” Anthropic wrote in a post on its website published Wednesday.

“We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. 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.”

In one ad released Wednesday, which the Wall Street Journal reports will air during Sunday’s Super Bowl, Anthropic portrays a young man asking a therapist how to communicate better with his mother.

The answer bears many of the hallmarks of LLM-produced responses that have come to define the genre — complimenting the user on the question, offering specific action items — before tailing off into an ad for a fictional dating service.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has so far been the definitive product of the AI boom, with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November 2022 kicking off the AI frenzy that has dominated financial markets and the business world since.

As of late December, the company had nearly 900 million weekly ChatGPT users.

Competition from Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Gemini model has presented OpenAI’s biggest challenge for its consumer business, but Anthropic’s focus on AI tools for businesses and developers has opened another flank for OpenAI in recent months.

Its Claude Code assistant has been a viral hit in the developer community and has been tagged as a key catalyst in the recent market sell-off focused on software stocks.

Still, Anthropic’s view on keeping advertising out of its Claude chatbot doesn’t mean it won’t find ways to turn the monetization gears.

“AI will increasingly interact with commerce, and we look forward to supporting this in ways that help our users,” the company wrote in Wednesday’s announcement.

“We’re particularly interested in the potential of agentic commerce, where Claude acts on a user’s behalf to handle a purchase or booking end to end. And we’ll continue to build features that enable our users to find, compare, or buy products, connect with businesses, and more — when they choose to do so.”