Sunday’s big rivalry won’t be Seattle versus New England. It’ll be Anthropic against OpenAI, via Super Bowl ads.

The two largest AI startups duking it out during America’s most-watched cultural event of the year signals a new phase in the battle for dominance: the fight for mindshare and legitimacy as both prepare for massive IPOs.

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“This is the Wild West, and everyone’s rushing in like it’s a gold rush or land grab, trying to convince people to go to their platform,” said Kim Whitler, a professor at University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business whose research focuses on analyzing what makes for an effective Super Bowl ad. “This is not about awareness at all; everyone knows Grok, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude. This is about trying to establish preference.”

Anthropic’s four ads take aim at OpenAI’s decision to start advertising inside ChatGPT. Words like “deception” and “treachery” flash across the screen as various conversations unfold between people and chatbots, embodied by humans. Shortly after beginning to answer the humans’ questions, the chatbots noticeably shift into sales pitches, like suggesting height-boosting sneakers for someone interested in fitness, or a cougar dating site to a son looking to improve communication with his mom.

“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” each clip announces at the end.

How can I communicate better with my mom?

VC-backed companies have a long history of trying to establish themselves during the Super Bowl. The Farmer’s Dog, which sells subscriptions to boutique dog food, tugged on heartstrings in 2023 when it suggested its food could extend the life of your furry companion. And in 2021, Robinhood tried to keep riding the meme-stock craze with its “we’re all investors” ad.

“It’s not just about ‘hey, we exist,’ but rather about establishing what you stand for during this big game where everyone is watching,” Whitler said. “The current market, it’s all so in flux. If you look at today’s current market share, will it be exactly the same in three years? Highly unlikely.”

New turf

Capturing attention is the name of this game.

“I am sure they’d like to be able to compete on new features and capabilities,” said Mathew Isaac, a professor of marketing at Seattle University who has analyzed and dissected the impact of Super Bowl ads in the last 14 years. “But they now also realize that brand associations matter a lot, and their goal right now is to just be a survivor and bring in as many users as they can.”

In 2022, the glut of ads by crypto startups, like FTX‘s spots featuring Larry David and Crypto.com‘s commercials with LeBron James, led many to refer to that year’s championship as the “Crypto Bowl.”

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This year’s AI ads have the same goal: normalize a new—and somewhat derided—technology for a large skeptical audience.

“All these folks are trying to buy in to get more legitimacy,” said Timothy McMahon, a marketing professor at Creighton University and New York University. “You’re buying into the conversation with a huge audience that is tuned into what the cultural zeitgeist is being shaped into.”

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And that’s certainly helpful for a consumer products company eyeing an IPO in the not-too-distant future. Consumers are both potential customers and potential retail investors. Both Robinhood and the ecommerce company Squarespace went public within months of splashing ads across Super Bowl viewers’ TV screens.

“When you go into the Super Bowl space, everyone thinks of you differently, it’s like you’ve arrived … you’re legit,” McMahon said.

Whole other ball game

This new phase of jostling could also have implications for the greater venture ecosystem.

“Traditional venture capital was designed to price and underwrite product and technology risk,” said Anna Barber, GP at Everywhere Ventures. “What we’re seeing now is a different game where large funds are allocating capital to secure narrative dominance and market inevitability, not to validate innovation.”

At the height of the dot-com bubble, when unfettered capital flowed into early internet startups, another company that used a Super Bowl ad to propel itself to an IPO was Pets.com. In February 2000, it debuted a series of commercials during Super Bowl 34 featuring a sock puppet, just weeks before it went public.

By November 2000, the company had shut down.

Barber worked at Petstore.com at the time, which Pets.com acquired that same year.

“When startups behave like brands before they behave like businesses, it’s fair to ask whether this is still venture capital or something new we haven’t named yet,” she said. “Some are calling it asset allocation. Others are calling it king-making.”

Anthropic’s other Super Bowl ads:

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This article originally appeared on PitchBook News