Ads have entered the chat. Three labs just placed their bets.
A couple of weeks ago, OpenAI started showing ads inside ChatGPT conversations. Not next to the answer. Inside it. You ask about cooking, an air fryer ad appears below the response. The targeting reads your conversation, your chat history, your past interactions with ads.
At the Super Bowl, Anthropic spent $14 million on a spot with one line: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Sam Altman got, in TechCrunch’s words, “exceptionally testy.”
Then last week Perplexity, the AI search company that was one of the first to test sponsored answers, killed the whole programme. An exec told the FT: “The challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything.”
Three companies, three bets on who pays for intelligence:
→OpenAI: you are the product. Free access, ad-subsidised. The Meta playbook.
→Anthropic: you are the customer. Subscriptions and enterprise contracts. The answer is never for sale.
→Perplexity: we tried it and the trust economics broke. When your product is “the best possible answer,” commercial signals poison the well.
We have watched this fork play out before in search, social media, email. Every time a new information layer gets monetised through advertising, trust erodes and a premium tier appears alongside it.
But the stakes here are different. People are not scanning a page of blue links. They are confiding in something. Asking it about their health, their money, their marriages. A recent poll found one in three Americans trust their chatbot as much as their priest.
Now someone is selling ad space in the confessional.
The question for anyone building on these platforms, or choosing one: your AI’s business model is about to become yours.
♻️ Repost if you’re choosing an AI platform right now. 🔔 Follow Felix Ghauri for future signals, not noise: AI and what changes next.
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Sources: OpenAI blog (Feb 2026), Anthropic Super Bowl campaign (CNBC, Feb 2026), Perplexity drops ads (FT, Feb 2026). Trust data referenced from my post on emotional infrastructure (Feb 22). Video credit: OpenAI.
