OpenAI Is Losing the Big Tech Race. The Super Bowl Ads Made That Clear.

"The commercials target Altman's company for its ongoing rollout of ads in ChatGPT. In each one of these spots, someone asks a question of a dead-behind-the-eyes person who represents ChatGPT. A few seconds into their answer, the A.I.-person pivots into selling something instead of just answering the question. Text appears on-screen: "Ads are coming to AI," then: "But not to Claude." (The company slightly tweaked that copy in the ad that actually aired during Super Bowl 60.)"

"Altman was furious. He called the ads "clearly dishonest," asserting that OpenAI won't run ads in that fashion because its users would reject them. He said, "Anthropic wants to control what people do with A.I.,", calling his competitor an "authoritarian company." Altman cribbed some of the language that the founders of Robinhood, the stock-trading app, have used in finance: "We believe everyone deserves to use A.I. and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency." ChatGPT serving ads is a matter of human liberty, if one really thinks about it."

"Amid a deluge of ads for A.I. products, it was easy to shrug the whole thing off as part of a big, messy circus. There were more A.I. commercials during the Super Bowl ( 15) than New England Patriots points (13). As a collective force, it was an exhausting blitz, designed to get the American public excited about A.I. in a way the industry's products still have not. (It also came at a moment when ad execs seem very light on creative ideas.)"

Anthropic ran Super Bowl commercials positioning its Claude assistant as ad-free while depicting ChatGPT as interrupted by ads. The spots showed an AI-person pivoting to sell products mid-answer with on-screen copy like "Ads are coming to AI" and "But not to Claude." Sam Altman denounced the commercials as "clearly dishonest," attacked Anthropic as trying to control user behavior and called it an "authoritarian company," and framed ad-free access as essential to agency and human liberty. The Super Bowl featured a flood of A.I. ads (15), creating an exhausting industry blitz intended to hype A.I. despite product limitations and uninspired creative execution.

Read at Slate Magazine