There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them.<\/p>\n
Advertising drives competition, helps people discover new products, and allows services like email and social media to be offered for free. We\u2019ve run our own ad campaigns<\/a>, and our AI models have, in turn, helped many of our customers in the advertising industry.<\/p>\n But including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.<\/p>\n We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users\u2019 interests. So we\u2019ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won\u2019t see \u201csponsored\u201d links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude\u2019s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.<\/p>\n The nature of AI conversations<\/p>\n When people use search engines or social media, they\u2019ve come to expect a mixture of organic and sponsored content. Filtering signal from noise is part of the interaction.<\/p>\n Conversations with AI assistants are meaningfully different. The format is open-ended; users often share context and reveal more than they would in a search query. This openness is part of what makes conversations with AI valuable, but it\u2019s also what makes them susceptible to influence in ways that other digital products are not.<\/p>\n Our analysis of conversations<\/a> with Claude (conducted in a way that keeps all data private and anonymous<\/a>) shows that an appreciable portion involve topics that are sensitive or deeply personal\u2014the kinds of conversations you might have with a trusted advisor. Many other uses involve complex software engineering tasks, deep work, or thinking through difficult problems. The appearance of ads in these contexts would feel incongruous\u2014and, in many cases, inappropriate.<\/p>\n We still have much to learn about the impact of AI models on the people who use them. Early<\/a> research<\/a> suggests both benefits\u2014like people finding support they couldn\u2019t access elsewhere\u2014and risks, including the potential for models to reinforce harmful beliefs in vulnerable users. Introducing advertising incentives at this stage would add another level of complexity. Our understanding<\/a> of how models translate the goals we set them into specific behaviors is still developing; an ad-based system could therefore have unpredictable results.<\/p>\n Incentive structures<\/p>\n Being genuinely helpful is one of the core principles of Claude\u2019s Constitution<\/a>, the document that describes our vision for Claude\u2019s character and guides how we train the model. An advertising-based business model would introduce incentives that could work against this principle.<\/p>\n Consider a concrete example. A user mentions they\u2019re having trouble sleeping. An assistant without advertising incentives would explore the various potential causes\u2014stress, environment, habits, and so on\u2014based on what might be most insightful to the user. An ad-supported assistant has an additional consideration: whether the conversation presents an opportunity to make a transaction. These objectives may often align\u2014but not always. And, unlike a list of search results, ads that influence a model\u2019s responses may make it difficult to tell whether a given recommendation comes with a commercial motive or not. Users shouldn\u2019t have to second-guess whether an AI is genuinely helping them or subtly steering the conversation towards something monetizable.<\/p>\n Even ads that don\u2019t directly influence an AI model\u2019s responses and instead appear separately within the chat window would compromise what we want Claude to be: a clear space to think and work. Such ads would also introduce an incentive to optimize for engagement\u2014for the amount of time people spend using Claude and how often they return. These metrics aren\u2019t necessarily aligned with being genuinely helpful. The most useful AI interaction might be a short one, or one that resolves the user\u2019s request without prompting further conversation.<\/p>\n We recognize that not all advertising implementations are equivalent. More transparent or opt-in approaches\u2014where users explicitly choose to see sponsored content\u2014might avoid some of the concerns outlined above. But the history of ad-supported products suggests that advertising incentives, once introduced, tend to expand over time as they become integrated into revenue targets and product development, blurring boundaries that were once more clear-cut. We\u2019ve chosen not to introduce these dynamics into Claude.<\/p>\n Our approach<\/p>\n Anthropic is focused on businesses, developers, and helping our users flourish. Our business model is straightforward: we generate revenue through enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions, and we reinvest that revenue into improving Claude for our users. This is a choice with tradeoffs, and we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions.<\/p>\n Expanding access to Claude is central to our public benefit mission, and we want to do it without selling our users\u2019 attention or data to advertisers. To that end, we\u2019ve brought AI tools and training to educators<\/a> in over 60 countries, begun national AI education pilots with multiple<\/a> governments<\/a>, and made Claude available to nonprofits<\/a> at a significant discount. We continue to invest in our smaller models so that our free offering remains at the frontier of intelligence, and we may consider lower-cost subscription tiers and regional pricing where there is clear demand for it. Should we need to revisit this approach, we\u2019ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so.<\/p>\n Supporting commerce<\/p>\n AI will increasingly interact with commerce, and we look forward to supporting this in ways that help our users. We\u2019re particularly interested in the potential of agentic commerce, where Claude acts on a user\u2019s behalf to handle a purchase or booking end to end. And we\u2019ll continue to build features that enable our users to find, compare, or buy products, connect with businesses, and more\u2014when they choose to do so.<\/p>\n