Anthropic promises no ads in Claude, upsetting ChatGPT’s CEO
A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it would begin testing advertisements displayed in ChatGPT responses. Shortly after, Google promised not to serve ads in Gemini (for now). Which path will other AI companies decide to take? We now have an answer for Anthropic, at least, which appears to be following in Google’s footsteps.
Anthropic recently announced via a blog post that its AI chatbot Claude would remain ad-free. There will be no sponsored links in conversations with Claude, and the chatbot’s responses will not be influenced by advertisers or contain product placements.
At the same time, the company has released a few promotional videos that criticize the whole idea of ads in chatbots. Although no competitors were directly named, it’s pretty clear what they were looking for:
Anthropic believes that while there are many good places for ads, a conversation with Claude is not one of them. Embedding advertisements in the chatbot would go against Claude’s main goal, which is to be “a truly useful assistant for work and for deep thinking.”
Sam Altman, CEO of rival company OpenAI, then took to social media with a comment about Anthropic’s advertising promise and videos. Altman appears to view Anthropic’s position as a veiled attack on OpenAI’s implementation of ads in ChatGPT:
This is a long essay in which Altman essentially goes on the offensive against Anthropic and Claude. He claims that Anthropic’s AI is an expensive product for the rich, while ads in ChatGPT keep it accessible to free users (ignoring that Claude himself is also free). Altman also boasts that ChatGPT has more free users in the state of Texas than Claude has in total in the entire United States.
All things considered, Claude is still small freight compared to ChatGPT… so what is it that pisses Altman off so much? A lion doesn’t care about the opinions of the sheep – unless perhaps he is slowly losing his established position as king of the jungle. With Gemini and Perplexity hot on his trail, perhaps Altman is feeling the heat and going after Anthropic.
