Anthropic takes aim at ChatGPT in Super Bowl ad, Sam Altman reacts

The Super Bowl has always been a theatre of excess, a place where beer brands bare their souls, tech companies try to sound human, and cultural skirmishes are settled with a 30-second budget the size of a small nation’s GDP. This year, however, the loudest hits seem to be coming from an AI company throwing pointed shade at its most famous rival.

Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI startup behind the chatbot Claude, is using Super Bowl LX to take a very public swing at OpenAI and its flagship product, ChatGPT.

In a series of ads released alongside the big game, Anthropic skewered the idea of advertising intruding into intimate, problem-solving conversations with AI. The timing was not subtle.

OpenAI is in the middle of introducing advertisements into ChatGPT, including for some paying users, a move that has unsettled parts of its vast user base and raised questions about how conversational AI will ultimately pay for itself.

The ads themselves lean heavily into satire. Each film is styled like a confessional moment, where a user turns to a professional for help. In one spot, a young man seeks advice from his therapist on how to better communicate with his mother. The tone is earnest, almost tender, until the therapist abruptly pivots into pitching a product.

In another, a 23-year-old asks a personal trainer for help building a workout routine, only to be upsold supportive insoles for “short kings”. The joke lands because the intrusion feels wrong. These are moments where people expect empathy, not a sales funnel.

Anthropic did not stop at implication. The titles of the ads, with names like “Violation” and “Betrayal”, leave little doubt about the intended target. The campaign was created specifically for Super Bowl LX to promote Claude as a “space to think”, a phrase Anthropic has also doubled down on in a blog post outlining its philosophy around advertising.

The company’s position is clear. Conversations with AI, it argues, should not be compromised by commercial incentives that distort advice or erode trust.

If Anthropic was aiming to provoke a response, it succeeded. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman addressed the ads directly in a lengthy post on X. His tone was part amused, part irritated.

First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.

But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic…

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026

He admitted the ads were funny and said they made him laugh, before accusing Anthropic of being “clearly dishonest” in its depiction of how ChatGPT advertising would work. OpenAI, Altman insisted, would never run ads in the invasive manner shown in the commercials and was well aware that users would reject such an approach.

Altman also used the moment to reassert OpenAI’s broader mission. He framed advertising as a necessary compromise to keep ChatGPT accessible at scale, arguing that free access creates agency. In a pointed comparison, he noted that more Texans use ChatGPT for free than the total number of people using Claude across the United States.

Anthropic, in his telling, serves an expensive product to wealthy users, while OpenAI is trying to bring AI to the billions who cannot afford subscriptions. If users choose to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, he added, they will not see ads.

The response then veered into ideology. Altman accused Anthropic of wanting to control how people use AI, from blocking certain companies from its coding tools to seeking to define the rules of acceptable use. The post ended on a confident note, celebrating the early traction of Codex (OpenAI's specialised AI coding agent integrated into ChatGPT) and declaring that “this time belongs to the builders”.

Anthropic, for its part, has maintained a quieter but firm stance. In its accompanying blog post, the company argued that Claude is designed to be a place for clear thinking, without hidden incentives nudging responses in commercially convenient directions.

While it did not name OpenAI directly, the subtext was unmistakable. Advertising, it suggested, changes the nature of advice, even if implemented with the best intentions.

Strip away the corporate rhetoric, and what remains is a very modern tech feud, playing out on the most old-school advertising stage imaginable. The crux of it is a question that will shape the future of consumer AI. Is it acceptable for a conversational assistant to double as an advertising channel, or does that undermine the trust that makes such tools useful in the first place?

For now, Anthropic has chosen mockery as its weapon, while OpenAI has responded with scale, statistics and a reminder of its ambitions.