A new age may have dawned with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) but some things remain the same — the familiar corporate inst-inct to dominate markets, and outspend and run down rivals, for instance. That is precisely what Sam Altman’s OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic’s Claude are currently engaged in.
As the two companies race to win more users and credibility, they have turned to one of the oldest playbooks in corporate warfare: Tongue-in-cheek advertising that takes pointed digs at rivals.
The pattern is familiar: Recall the fights between Coca- Cola and Pepsi, Samsung and Apple, Blackberry and Nokia, among countless other examples. The latest round of brand dissing is playing out not over fizzy drinks or smartphones, but over how AI should be funded, marketed and trusted.
Anthropic’s dig
Anthropic has released four 61-second commercials on YouTube. One features a man in a park asking another man for fitness advice. The response begins in the stiff, robotic tone resembling an AI chatbot explanation (“Perfect, let me personalise this for you”), before abruptly turning into a sales pitch for shoe insoles.
The screen then cuts to a message: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
The ad does not mention OpenAI or ChatGPT by name, but the reference is widely understood. Anthropic has also released three other ads on YouTube using similar scenarios, where AI-style conversations suddenly veer into product promotions.
The other three ads present different situations — of a student and professor, a son talking to a therapist, and a woman asking for a business idea. Each has the same message: Ads are coming to AI but Claude is not going to use ads.
The campaign follows OpenAI’s announcement last month that it would begin testing ads within ChatGPT for free users and subscribers on its lower-priced Go tier in the US.
To be sure, the ‘exchange’ has been a bit one-sided so far. According to OpenAI, its ads will be clearly labelled, appear at the bottom of responses, and will not influence how ChatGPT answers questions. The company also said ads will not appear for sensitive topics such as politics and mental health, and that users can opt out of personalisation, and minors will not be shown ads.
However, Anthropic, in a blog post released alongside the campaign, said advertising, once introduced, only tends to expand over time and can shape product decisions and engagement goals.
The company said it wants Claude to remain “unambiguously” aligned to users’ interests rather than external commercial incentives.
That stance, however, raises questions about whether an ad-free model can scale at the pace demanded by the AI race.
“While Anthropic’s ad-free model emphasises trust and user-focus, its long-term viability at scale remains uncertain,” said Salman Waris, founder and managing partner at TechLegis, a law firm. “Anthropic has acknowledged that it loses money on every free chat without an advertising revenue stream. Its enterprise and subscription revenues may not support global expansion at the same pace as OpenAI.”
Waris added that the company’s position was a “bold bet on premium user-experience over mass-market monetisation,” but said there were questions on whether such a model could serve price-sensitive markets – something Anthropic would need as it prepares for a potential IPO in 2026.
Money at stake
Advertising has become increasingly important as AI companies ramp up spending. OpenAI has signed infrastructure deals worth more than $1.4 trillion in 2025, making new revenue streams a priority, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Digital advertising has long been the main source of income for companies such as Google and Meta, and OpenAI has indicated ads could help support its scale.
AI companies are already spending heavily to market themselves. Industry estimates show that tech companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Perplexity spent $333.6 million on US broadcast TV ads for AI products last year, a 43 per cent rise on-year. Digital ad spending more than tripled to $426 million, WSJ reported.
Airtime during the Super Bowl — the annual American football league final — alone costs more than $8 million for a 30-second slot, excluding production costs.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman retorted that he laughed at the ads, while questioning Anthropic’s “clearly dishonest portrayal” of what OpenAI plans to do.
On Wednesday (February 4), Altman posted on X, “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,” adding: “We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.”
This year’s Super Bowl, which is scheduled to begin from February 8, will feature advertisements from both Anthropic and OpenAI, marking a moment when AI companies are no longer just selling products to businesses and developers, but are directly courting mass-market users.
The Super Bowl draws massive viewership, often over 120 million in the US, making it one of the largest live TV audiences, which creates prime advertising real estate despite the high costs.
For Anthropic, the Super Bowl debut is also a strategic statement. The move echoes classic marketing battles seen earlier in industries such as soft drinks, smartphones and telecom, where rivals publicly take swipes at each other through high-profile ad campaigns.
“Given the amount of capital and entrepreneurial energy being directed at the AI sector, such clashes of ideas are inevitable,” said Shailesh Dhuri, chief executive of Decimal Point Analytics, an AI-powered data analysis firm. He said the industry is likely to settle around three broad business models: Ad-free, open-weights (which gives restricted access to business systems) and ad-based, with each model taking digs at the others to capture mindshare in the early stages of the market.
“This kind of brand-to-brand sparring is becoming inevitable,” Waris said. “AI companies are now behaving like consumer brands, competing for trust, mindshare and default status.”
How Claude stacks up
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including chief executive Dario Amodei. It is best known for its Claude family of AI models and coding-focused tool Claude Code, which has seen rapid adoption in recent months. Claude was launched in March 2023.
The company is significantly smaller than OpenAI, which says it has more than 800 million weekly active users. However, Anthropic has gained traction with enterprise customers, partly due to Claude’s performance in coding-related tasks.
Since September, Anthropic has been advertising under the slogan “Keep Thinking”, positioning Claude as a partner for complex problem-solving rather than a replacement for human-thinking.
As AI tools move closer to everyday consumer use, the questions around monetisation, advertising and user alignment are now turning to how companies will differentiate themselves in the future – and, crucially, how they’ll sell that difference to the public.
 "Claude vs ChatGPT: Anthropic mocks OpenAI's ad plans at the Super Bowl")
