{"id":411664,"date":"2026-02-06T19:50:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T19:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/411664\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T19:50:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T19:50:23","slug":"openai-is-hoppin-mad-about-anthropics-new-super-bowl-tv-ads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/411664\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI is hoppin’ mad about Anthropic’s new Super Bowl TV ads"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X<\/a> after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking<\/a> the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic\u2019s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads<\/a> in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.<\/p>\n

Altman called Anthropic\u2019s ads \u201cclearly dishonest,\u201d accused the company of being \u201cauthoritarian,\u201d and said it \u201cserves an expensive product to rich people,\u201d while Rouch wrote<\/a>, \u201cReal betrayal isn\u2019t ads. It\u2019s control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s four commercials<\/a>, part of a campaign called \u201cA Time and a Place,\u201d each open with a single word splashed across the screen: \u201cBetrayal,\u201d \u201cViolation,\u201d \u201cDeception,\u201d and \u201cTreachery.\u201d They depict scenarios where a person asks a human stand-in for an AI chatbot for personal advice, only to get blindsided by a product pitch.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n Anthropic\u2019s 2026 Super Bowl commercial.<\/p>\n

In one spot, a man asks a therapist-style chatbot (a woman sitting in a chair) how to communicate better with his mom. The bot offers a few suggestions, then pivots to promoting a fictional cougar-dating site called Golden Encounters.<\/p>\n

In another spot, a skinny man looking for fitness tips instead gets served an ad for height-boosting insoles. Each ad ends with the tagline: \u201cAds are coming to AI. But not to Claude.\u201d Anthropic plans to air a 30-second version during Super Bowl LX, with a 60-second cut running in the pregame, according<\/a> to CNBC.<\/p>\n

In the X posts, the OpenAI executives argue that these commercials are misleading because the planned ChatGPT ads will appear labeled at the bottom of conversational responses in banners and will not alter the chatbot\u2019s answers.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a slight twist: OpenAI\u2019s own blog post<\/a> about its ad plans states that the company will \u201ctest ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there\u2019s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation,\u201d meaning the ads will be conversation-specific.<\/p>\n

The financial backdrop explains some of the tension over ads in chatbots. As Ars previously reported<\/a>, OpenAI struck more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals in 2025 and expects to burn roughly $9 billion this year while generating about $13 billion in revenue. Only about 5 percent of ChatGPT\u2019s 800 million weekly users pay for subscriptions. Anthropic is also not yet profitable, but it relies on enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions rather than advertising, and it has not taken on infrastructure commitments at the same scale as OpenAI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-411664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}