Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad, one of four ads the AI lab dropped on Wednesday, begins with the word “BETRAYAL” splashed boldly across the screen. The camera pans to a man earnestly asking a chatbot (obviously meant to depict ChatGPT) for advice on how to talk to his mother.
Botten, portrayed by a blonde woman, offers some classic advice. Start by listening. Try a walk in nature! And then twists into an ad for a fictitious (we hope!) cougar dating site called Golden Encounters. Anthropic ends the spot by saying that while ads will come to AI, they won’t come to its own chatbot, Claude.
Another commercial features a small young man seeking advice on building a six pack. After offering his height, age and weight, the bot serves him an ad for height-enhancing insoles.
The anthropic ads are smartly targeted at OpenAI’s users, following the company’s recent announcement that ads will be coming to ChatGPT’s free tier. And they caused immediate attention and made headlines, as Anthropic “taunts”, “spears” and “dunks on” OpenAI.
They’re funny enough that even Sam Altman admitted to the X that he laughed at them. But he clearly didn’t find them very funny. They inspired him to write a short story calling his rival “dishonest” and “authoritarian”.
In that post, Altman explains that an ad-supported tier is intended to shoulder the burden of offering free ChatGPT to many of its millions of users. ChatGPT is still the most popular chatbot by a wide margin.
But the OpenAI CEO insisted the ads were “dishonest” by suggesting that ChatGPT will distort a conversation to insert an ad (and possibly for an off-color product, to boot). “Obviously, we would never run ads the way Anthropic portrays them,” Altman wrote in the social media post. “We’re not stupid, and we know our users would reject it.”
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
23 June 2026
In fact, OpenAI has promised that ads will be separate, labeled, and never influence a chat. But the company has also said it plans to make them conversational—which is the central claim of Anthropic’s ads. As OpenAI explained on its blog, “We plan to test ads at the bottom of responses in ChatGPT when there is a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.”
Altman then proceeded to hurl some equally dubious claims at his rival. “Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” he wrote. “We also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to the billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.”
But Claude also has a free chat tier with subscriptions for $0, $17, $100 and $200. ChatGPT’s tiers are $0, $8, $20 and $200. It can be argued that the subscription levels are roughly equivalent.
Altman also claimed in his post that “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI.” He claims it blocks the use of Claude Code by “companies they don’t like,” like OpenAI, and said Anthropic tells people what they can and can’t use AI for.
True, Anthropic’s entire marketing pitch since day one has been “responsible AI”. The company was founded by two former OpenAI alumni who, after all, claimed they became concerned about AI security while working there.
Still, both chatbot companies have usage policies, AI safeguards, and talk about AI security. And while OpenAI allows ChatGPT to be used for erotica, while Anthropic does not, OpenAI, like Anthropic, has determined that some content should be blocked, especially regarding mental health.
Yet Altman took this Anthropic-tells-you-what-to argument to an extreme level when he accused Anthropic of being “authoritarian.”
“An authoritarian company won’t get us there on its own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It’s a dark road,” he wrote.
Using “authoritarian” in a rant over a sassy Super Bowl ad is misplaced at best. It is particularly tactless when you consider the current geopolitical environment, where protesters around the world have been killed by agents of their own government. While business competitors have been duking it out in ads since the dawn of time, Anthropic clearly hit a nerve.