Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, speaks to Bloomberg TV in San Francisco on December 9, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic spent millions on Super Bowl commercials and is criticizing rival OpenAI’s recent decision to start showing ads within its ChatGPT chatbot.
The artificial intelligence startup announced Wednesday that its chatbot Claude will continue to be ad-free. No ads or sponsored links appear near user conversations, and chatbot answers are not influenced by third-party product placement.
The company said the ads were “uncomfortable” and “often inappropriate” due to the personal nature of users’ conversations with Claude.
Anthropic announced Wednesday its first Super Bowl campaign centered around the company’s decision not to advertise on Claude. Anthropic will air a 60-second pregame ad and a 30-second in-game ad. Both feature the tagline, “Advertising is coming to AI, but not to Claude.”
A 30-second slot during this year’s games sold for an average of $8 million, while five to 10 ads sold for more than $10 million each, said Mark Marshall, NBC’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including CEO Dario Amodei. The company is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude, and its AI coding tool Claude Code has exploded in popularity in recent months.
“Our business model is simple: We generate revenue through enterprise agreements and paid subscriptions, and then reinvest that revenue into improving Claude for our users,” Anthropic said in a blog post. “This is a choice with trade-offs, and we respect that other AI companies may reasonably come to different conclusions.”
OpenAI announced last month that it would begin testing ads for free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the United States. The company said the ads will be clearly labeled and displayed at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers and will not affect ChatGPT answers.
OpenAI has signed more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals in 2025, so bringing advertising to ChatGPT could help the company meet those ambitious spending commitments. Digital advertising has long been a major revenue driver for Google and other big tech companies like Meta.
By ceasing advertising within Claude, Anthropic may miss out on a lucrative revenue stream, but the company is not shying away from the decision.
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