Ads Reach Chatbots as OpenAI Signs 100,000 Advertisers While Anthropic Stays Ad-Free
The split between chatbot makers now turns on whether conversations themselves become a target for advertising.
Anthropic is keeping its promise to leave Claude free of ads, and its recent IPO filing did not mention ad revenue at all, a stance it can afford given roughly $112 billion in investor cash. Rivals are moving the other way: OpenAI has signed more than 100,000 advertisers since putting ads into ChatGPT in February, and Google has widened ads in AI Mode to ten more countries. Smaller chatbot platforms may depend on ads more heavily, and the ad tech firm Koah says ads partly composed by AI draw about twice the clicks of fully human-written ones, though the reason is hard to pin down. Koah reports a click rate near 3 percent, roughly on par with Google's mature ad system, and says chatbot prompts are at least twice as long as search queries, giving it more context to choose ads. Its data also raises unresolved privacy questions, since it receives the full conversation history before showing an ad, which Koah says it anonymizes.
Why it matters
The divide is now clear: some chatbot makers are building advertising into their products while Anthropic says Claude will stay free of ads and did not list ad revenue in its IPO filing. For users, that means the same conversation may be handled very differently depending on the platform, with some services sharing full conversation histories with ad partners before an ad is shown. Smaller platforms may lean on ads more heavily than the largest players, which could make their business models and their treatment of user data a different question from those of the leaders.
Matters or hype?
Does this story matter, or is it hype? Vote before you see what everyone else said.