After Sam Altman calls Anthropic’s ads ‘clearly dishonest’, company's executive says: We are not even …

Days after OpenAI CEO Sam Atlman criticised Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads targeting ChatGPT, the Claude-maker’s commercial chief has issued a rebuttal, escalating the public ‘war of words’ between two of the world’s leading AI companies.

Responding to the criticism, Anthropic’s chief commercial officer Gary Smith defended the company’s “unconflicted” business model. The dispute centres on Anthropic’s ad campaign, which mocked ChatGPT’s ad placement while announcing “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”In an interview with CNBC, Smith said Anthropic is “unconflicted” by not offering ads, as it focuses on selling its AI to businesses.“We’re not fighting another partner for eyeballs or for ad revenue or anything.

Our focus is on model quality, model efficacy, how it can integrate across the wider enterprise, which comes back to all of the investments that we’re really focused on... we are exclusively focused on a different set of things. Our attention is not split,” he said.Smith also said that it was the company’s “conscious decision” not to include ads in Claude, adding that advertising would take Anthropic in “directions where you’re optimising for the wrong things.”

He further explained that without ads, the company can focus on areas such as making AI models more intelligent and being “genuinely helpful, safe, and trusted.”

Why OpenAI leadership is unhappy with Anthropic’s ads

Anthropic made multiple Super Bowl ads and shared them on social media. The ads took a direct jab at OpenAI’s recent testing of advertising within ChatGPT. Altman quickly dismissed the campaign, calling it “funny” but “clearly dishonest.” Altman asserted that OpenAI would “obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them.”OpenAI president Greg Brockman also hit back at Anthropic's Super Bowl ad campaign, calling out what he sees as a “fundamental difference in our respective outlooks on AI.” However, the version that aired on TV was softer than the one Anthropic initially uploaded to YouTube. The original tagline read, "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." During the actual broadcast, it was swapped to: "There is a time and place for ads.

Your conversations with AI should not be one of them." The softer tone suggested that Anthropic pulled back slightly after Altman’s 420-word criticism.

Anthropic’s chief commercial officer talks about infrastructure ‘wars’

While talking about the race to win infrastructure war, Smith highlighted both the companies’s vastly different approaches in terms of “announcement” culture.While OpenAI has committed over $1 trillion to future infrastructure, including a $100 billion partnership with Nvidia and a $10 billion deal with Cerebras, Anthropic’s is taking a disciplined approach, committing $50 billion to US data centres with a “do more with less” mindset.“We’ve made less flashy headlines than some, and we’ve been focused on growing revenue and winning business, rather than spending money and announcing the biggest compute deals that we possibly could,” Smith told CNBC.Smith also pushed back against the idea that Anthropic is trailing in the infrastructure race, saying that the company is not splashing in infrastructure it doesn't need.“This isn’t us buying ahead of demand,” Smith said while praising the “incredible growth” in Claude Code and Cowork. These are the two key products that Anthropic sells to businesses. Smith added there had been “incredible growth in enterprise business overall, that we absolutely need to satisfy.”“We are looking at buying as close to the right amount of compute to keep us on that very, very significant acceleration curve, and not go too much, not go too little, because too little would be bad for our customers,” he said.