Anthropic Takes Its Fight With OpenAI to the Super Bowl

Anthropic is bringing its AI grudge match to America's biggest screen, and it's gunning straight for ChatGPT's business model. The maker of the Claude chatbot is airing a 30-second spot during Super Bowl LX (with a longer pregame cut), anchoring a new campaign built around one message: Ads and intimate AI chats don't mix, per Quartz. In each commercial, what looks like a normal, empathetic helper—for example, a therapist, a teacher, a trainer—suddenly swerves into an over-the-top product pitch, mimicking the tone and rhythm of chatbot responses. Every spot ends with the same tag line: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."

The campaign, titled "A Time and a Place," leans hard into that advertising contrast via spots named "Treachery," "Deception," "Violation," and "Betrayal." Anthropic couples them with a public pledge: Claude will be ad-free, with no sponsored links, embedded product pushes, or advertiser influence on responses. The move is a direct response to OpenAI, which in January said it'll start testing ads in ChatGPT for US adults on its free and $8-a-month "Go" tiers. Those ads will appear below answers and be labeled as sponsored, OpenAI says, while insisting they won't shape the chatbot's actual output.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the Anthropic ads funny but "so clearly dishonest," arguing his company would never insert the kind of midsentence shilling that the campaign depicts. He also cast OpenAI as the one expanding free access and painted Anthropic as a more expensive, gated rival (TechCrunch notes that Claude does have a free tier available). Underneath the sniping is a simple split-screen: OpenAI is betting users will accept ads in exchange for cheap, powerful AI; Anthropic is betting there's now a market for paying not to be pitched while you're asking for help. CNBC notes that Anthropic was founded about five years ago by former OpenAI staffers, including Anthropic's now-CEO, Dario Amodei.