Anthropic is airing a Super Bowl ad mocking OpenAI for bringing ads to ChatGPT. Anthropic is spending upwards of $8 Million committing that they won’t introduce ads into its chatbot, Claude.
Anthropic has focused most of its efforts on its commercial customers, with 80%+ of their ~$9B ARR coming from those enterprise customers. They are likely looking to diversify ahead of their IPO, rumored to be this year. Compare this to OpenAI’s customer mix, where about 30% of their revenue is from businesses.
OpenAI introducing ads into ChatGPT is OpenAI trying to profit from its large consumer base who are not paying, or are on their lowest plan (Go, $8/month), likely also trying to diversify and juice numbers before they IPO. Both of these companies are trying to win market share racing to an IPO, with OpenAI stating that they want to go public before Anthropic, by the end of this year.
Anthropic’s counter positioning to OpenAI on ads tracks with their overall messaging taking privacy, trust, and AI safety more seriously than their counterparts. This could be an opening for Anthropic, although the January 2026 traffic numbers (per Apptopia) that were recently released show they have a lot of ground to make up.
ChatGPT is still the leader, but ceded quite a bit of market share to rivals, notably Gemini and Grok. ChatGPT is sitting at ~45% as of Jan 2026, down from ~69% in Jan 2025. Claude is second to last just above DeepSeek, and just below Perplexity in consumer market share, changing little. Claude, however, has the highest time spent in its app out of all competitors tracked and has strong sentiment and usage among developers with its Claude Code offering.
As someone who uses Claude, and doesn’t use ChatGPT at all anymore, I think Anthropic can benefit from more ad spend to gain market share. The traffic numbers in Jan show that it is OpenAI’s game to lose. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, recently calling a “code red” to focus on improving ChatGPT is telling. Anthropic can be competitive, they just need to show consumers what they have already proven to businesses.
Update: Sam altman posted a scathing tweet, calling Anthropic “Authoritarian” and bashing Anthropics decsion to make the ads.