nthropic is taking shots at OpenAI over chatbot ads. And it's making promises it might actually be able to keep — something destined to be much harder for Google.

Following OpenAI’s decision to test out ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic is going the other direction: On Wednesday, the company published a blog post stating that it will not embed ads within its flagship chatbot, Claude. This includes forgoing sponsored links adjacent to conversations with the chatbot and allowing advertisers to influence its outputs with third-party product placements.

Anthropic noted that putting ads within Claude is “incompatible” with its vision for the chatbot: to be a genuinely helpful tool that acts “unambiguously in our users’ interests.”

Though users expect ads in search engines and social media, the AI firm said that AI conversations are “meaningfully different,” as users often reveal more context than they would with a search query, and models are more susceptible to influence than other digital platforms.

• Chatbot conversations also run a wide gamut, some revealing sensitive personal information and others involving complex tasks, such as software engineering or in-depth research. “The appearance of ads in these contexts would feel incongruous — and, in many cases, inappropriate,” the company noted.
• Anthropic also noted that AI models may already pose risks to “vulnerable users,” and introducing digital ads would only add “another level of complexity” that the technology is not yet ready to handle.

“Even ads that don’t directly influence an AI model’s responses and instead appear separately within the chat window would compromise what we want Claude to be: a clear space to think and work,” the company said.

In addition to the blog post, the company released a video demonstrating why ads don’t work in AI models, in which a man asks a chatbot how to better connect with his mother and is instead routed to a dating site called “Golden Encounters.” It’s also planning to run a Super Bowl ad highlighting the bothersome nature of ads in these contexts.

Anthropic isn’t the first company to decry ads following OpenAI’s decision. In late January, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis took a stab at the company in an interview with Axios at Davos, saying that he was “surprised” at OpenAI’s choice to incorporate ads so early, and didn’t feel rushed to make a “a knee-jerk” decision on ads.

“The choices that advanced AI companies make today about how they’ll cover the mind-boggling costs they are taking on to build AI systems will inevitably shape the systems themselves,” Miranda Bogen, director of the AI governance lab at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told The Deep View.