Sam Altman got exceptionally testy over Claude Super Bowl ads

Sam Altman got exceptionally testy over Claude Super Bowl ads

Anthropic’s Super Bowl industrial, certainly one of 4 ads the AI lab dropped on Wednesday, begins with the phrase “BETRAYAL” splashed boldly across the display screen. The digital camera pans to a person earnestly asking a chatbot (clearly meant to depict ChatGPT) for recommendation on speak to his mother.

The bot, portrayed by a blonde girl, affords some traditional bits of recommendation. Start by listening. Try a nature stroll! And then twists into an advert for a fictitious (we hope!) cougar-dating web site called Golden Encounters. Anthropic finishes the spot by saying that while ads are coming to AI, they received’t be coming to its personal chatbot, Claude.

Another industrial incorporates a slight younger man on the lookout for recommendation on constructing a six pack. After providing his top, age, and weight, the bot serves him an advert for height-boosting insoles.

The Anthropic commercials are cleverly geared toward OpenAI’s customers, after that company’s latest announcement that ads shall be coming to ChatGPT’s free tier. And they brought on a right away stir, spawning headlines that Anthropic “mocks,” “skewers,” and “dunks on” OpenAI.

They are humorous sufficient that even Sam Altman admitted on X that he laughed at them. But he clearly didn’t actually discover them humorous. They impressed him to put in writing a novella-sized rant that devolved into calling his rival “dishonest” and “authoritarian.”

First, the good a part of the Anthropic ads: they’re humorous, and I laughed.

But I’m wondering why Anthropic would go for one thing so clearly dishonest. Our most important precept for ads says that we received’t do precisely this; we’d clearly never run ads in the manner Anthropic…

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026

In that put up, Altman explains that an ad-supported tier is meant to shoulder the burden of providing free ChatGPT to many of its tens of millions of customers. ChatGPT is still the most common chatbot by a large margin.

But the OpenAI CEO insisted the ads had been “dishonest” in implying that ChatGPT will twist a dialog to insert an advert (and probably for an off-color product, as well).”We would clearly never run ads in the manner Anthropic depicts them,” Altman wrote in the social media put up. “We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.”

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Indeed, OpenAI has promised ads shall be separate, labeled, and can never affect a chat. But the company has also said it’s planning on making them conversation-specific — which is the central allegation of Anthropic’s ads. As OpenAI explained on its weblog, “We plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.”

Altman then went on to fling some equally questionable assertions at his rival. “Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” he wrote. “We also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.”

But Claude has a free chat tier, too, with subscriptions at $0, $17, $100, and $200. ChatGPT’s tiers are $0, $8, $20, and $200. One might argue the subscription tiers are pretty equal.

Altman also alleged in his put up that “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI.” He argues it blocks usage of Claude Code from “companies they don’t like,” like OpenAI, and said Anthropic tells people what they will and might’t use AI for.

True, Anthropic’s entire advertising deal since day one has been “responsible AI.” The company was based by two former OpenAI alums, after all, who claimed they grew alarmed about AI security once they labored there.

Still, each chatbot firms have usage insurance policies, AI guardrails, and speak about AI security. And while OpenAI permits ChatGPT to be used for erotica while Anthropic doesn’t, OpenAI, like Anthropic, has decided that some content ought to be blocked, notably with reference to psychological health.

Yet Altman took this Anthropic-tells-you-what-to-do argument to an excessive level when he accused Anthropic of being “authoritarian.”

“One authoritarian company won’t get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path,” he wrote.

Using “authoritarian” in a rant over a cheeky Super Bowl advert is misplaced, at best. It’s notably tactless when contemplating the current geopolitical atmosphere through which protesters round the world have been killed by brokers of their very own authorities. While enterprise rivals have been duking it out in ads since the starting of time, clearly Anthropic hit a nerve.

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