Anthropic made a Super Bowl commercial on ads, it is making Sam Altman very angry

The gloves are off. AI companies are leaving no stone unturned in a bid to attract more users to their platforms. Anthropic has released four new commercials on YouTube, with one of them set to be shown during the Super Bowl. These ads indirectly take a jibe at OpenAI for showing ads in ChatGPT. And Sam Altman has responded.

Anthropic has uploaded four ads on YouTube that show an AI in a human form giving advice to a person on various topics, be it family relationships, business ideas, or writing an essay. At first, the AI responds just like you would expect, giving appropriate suggestions.

However, soon, the chatbot starts talking like it is promoting an app or service, just as creating your dating profile, or lending you credit. And when the user is left confused, the video ends with the text, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Do note that the ads never mention OpenAI or ChatGPT directly.

What did Sam Altman say?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote a long post on X. He started off with a light comment, saying that the ads made him laugh. Though, Altman alleged that Anthropic had been “dishonest” with these commercials. He wrote, “We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.”

Altman took a quote out of George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, to describe how his AI rival had shown the ads. He said, “It’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real.”

Though Sam Altman did not explicitly describe how ChatGPT will show ads, the OpenAI chatbot is expected to place ads below generated text. During initial tests, the ads are also likely to be clearly labelled, as per the AI startup.

Sam Altman says more people in Texas use ChatGPT than total Claude users in USA

The OpenAI cofounder did not hold back from taking digs at Anthropic either. He claimed that ChatGPT had a higher free user base in Texas alone, than all of Claude users in the US. Though he pointed out that both companies have different business models.

While Anthropic had an “expensive product for rich people,” Altman claimed that OpenAI wants to “bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.”

Additionally, Sam Altman stated that Anthropic was trying to control how people use AI. He said, “ they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us).” Anthropic has blocked access to its models on AI coding platform Cursor for rival AI companies including OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI (now part of SpaceX).