Super Bowl AI ad spat heats up as Altman lashes out at Anthropic campaign

OpenAI said last month that it will begin testing ads with its free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the U.S., and Anthropic announced Wednesday that the company plans to keep its chatbot Claude ad-free.

Anthropic seized on the opportunity and took a not-so-subtle swipe at its rival with its Super Bowl campaign, which centers around Anthropic’s decision to keep ads out of Claude. Anthropic will air a 60-second pregame ad and a 30-second in-game ad that both feature the tag line, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Altman said the commercials are “deceptive” and that OpenAI would “obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them.”

“We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that,” Altman wrote. “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.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers who left the company due to disagreements over its direction.

The two startups have been fierce rivals since Anthropic’s inception, and they’ve both raised billions of dollars of capital as they’ve jostled for users, enterprise customers and market share.

Altman said Wednesday that “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI” and that the company “serves an expensive product to rich people.” He said OpenAI also has more free users than Anthropic does, which means OpenAI has “a differently-shaped problem than they do.”

OpenAI said last month that ads within ChatGPT will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers and will not influence ChatGPT’s responses.

“As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything,” Altman wrote.

WATCH: OpenAI models could help power future versions of Amazon’s Alexa assistant: Source