Forget about the big game on Sunday. Two heavyweights have been battling it out this week over a topic that’s become all-too-familiar over the years: advertising creep.
It’s a tale as old as time, in some respects. Many a CEO have proudly declared that their company’s platform or services will remain ad-free, only to later succumb to the lure of all that advertising revenue and embrace it.
And that’s creating a new divide among AI platforms—one that will play out to the world’s largest TV viewing audience during the Super Bowl.
Among the nearly dozen AI-related ads on Sunday will be two 60-second spots each for OpenAI and Anthropic.
While OpenAI will use its time to tout how its ChatGPT helps people build things with a real-world impact, Anthropic is taking a swipe at its much-larger competitor’s recent decision to incorporate ads into the platform—and its virtuous decision to keep its Claude AI assistant ad-free.
This off-field action has already made for some entertaining viewing. Anthropic dropped four ads this past week set to Dr. Dre’s 2001 song “What’s the Difference,” which all conclude with the same warning: “Ads are coming to AI. But not Claude.”
That elicited a lengthy post on X by Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, that’s since become the topic of much ridicule.
While Anthropic’s Black Mirror-esque ads are “extremely clever,” they’re also strategic, as the company seeks to position itself much like Apple has with its privacy-first messaging, says John Battelle, an entrepreneur and author.
Claude’s marketshare may be a tiny fraction of ChatGPT’s, but Anthropic’s swipe at OpenAI’s reversal on advertising was well-played—and it makes an important point, according to Battelle.
“I applaud what they did,” he tells Fast Company. “This needs to be talked about.”
Pivot to revenue
For Altman, the advertising U-turn took about 15 months. In October 2024, he said that he viewed advertising as a “last resort” as a business model for OpenAI, only to seemingly reverse course a few weeks ago.
He’s hardly the first to do so—and for good reason.
“There’s no question that the only business model that you can employ if you want to scale a business is advertising,” Battelle says.
Advertising . . . finds a way
Recent decades have seen a well-trod path for companies that transitioned to an advertising-supported business model from one that was originally based on subscriptions or, seemingly, free for users.
Advertising has slowly—and sometimes not so slowly—crept into almost every major platform controlled by a large tech company, whether it’s social networks like Facebook or streaming services like Netflix, to name a few.
But Google perhaps offers “the canonical example” of a company’s founders finding their advertising religion and walking back prior vows to remain ad-free, says Battelle, whose book “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” was published 20 years ago by Penguin
In a 1998 white paper laying out their vision for Google, cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t mince words about the potential “mixed incentives” of a commercial search engine with a business model predicated on advertising.
“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users,” wrote the duo, then-PhD students at Stanford University. “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
In 2000, Google began selling advertisements. To say it’s become a big business would be an understatement. Parent company Alphabet reported this past week that Google advertising accounted for more than 72% of its $113.8 billion revenue in the fourth quarter.
A hill to die on
For some founders, advertising has been a hill they’ve been willing to die on. Clashes about advertising on WhatsApp were reportedly among a variety of reasons why cofounder Jan Koum ultimately left parent company Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2018, four years after the messaging app was acquired.
Koum had long expressed his disdain for advertising and how it worsened a product.
He vowed to keep advertising out of an app where people communicate with friends and family, and his first-ever tweet was a quote from the movie Fight Club that pulls no punches: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”
Last year, WhatsApp debuted ads in the app.
The future of advertising on AI
Like many before them, the founders of AI companies must now determine where their line in the sand is on advertising. And it’s no surprise that advertising has eventually found its way into AI platforms, as Battelle laid out in a recent blog post.
As Google, Facebook, Uber, and other companies have taught us, advertising creep does gradually change the services we know and love, Battelle says. In some cases, like with Instagram, the product today barely resembles its pre-advertising self.
“When you commit to advertising, you commit to the incentives of advertising,” he says.
Even if advertising on AI platforms will inevitably evolve with time, Battelle says an imperative question now is what that future will look like—and particularly if social media is the reference point.
“Man, things are not going to be pretty if the business model that drove social media also drives generative AI.”