I hadn't watched these before, but wow the AI wars are no joke. "Betrayal", "Deception", "Violation", "Treachery"... It's like the Cola Wars, but 10x more personal.
I pay ChatGPT 20 bucks a month, or whatever the subscription is. I get massive value out of this, Sam Altman is paying for my computing power. I’m paying a tenth(or less) of what the actual price is. Once that no longer applies, I will ditch ChatGPT and probably build my own LLM computer.
So thanks Sam for giving me cheap computing power.
Whose agency? Ads are designed to reduce agency. It’s a red queen’s race from there. It leads to a high level of optimized manipulation and intrusiveness.
That was one of the core points of anthropic’s article.
sama is right that anthropic’s and openai’s businesses are differently shaped. Thank goodness for that.
Anthropic’s strategy is weird, they may not be inserting ads today but I am sure this is where they will end up if they get enough volume of users. So saying “not to Claude” is putting them in the same plane as google’s “do no evil”. They will walk it back sooner or later.
It's the same ad campaign Samsung did with the charger and headphone jack after Apple ditched them. Let's see if they hold out longer than what Samsung did back then.
Sometimes quality is worth it over quantity of users.
The free to paid user ratio of both services is worth seeing too.
Personally I find both are growing cleanly into their own areas of strengths and that's actually a good thing because it provides more coverage for solutions.
> Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.
But they are paying, aren't they?
Advertisements don't generate money from thin air. Advertisements cause people to spend money they otherwise would not have spent. That's why companies buy ads in the first place.
And if you're showing ads to poor people, you're probably causing them to spend money they don't have.
It's a bit more complicated. On average, someone is paying, but averages can be misleading. As we see with free-to-play games, whales can subsidize a lot of usage by other people who don't pay a thing.
It seems like the same is true of advertising. Yes, some people are spending money but it doesn't necessarily follow that they're people who can't afford it.
Not a fan of Altman, but I don't think the ad will serve Anthropic well in long run.
They may not run ads for foreseeable future, but there will come a point where they introduce a different tier service that does, whether they want it or not.
You're right. As long as they don't make a long series of these ads and espouse it as a virtue like Google did with their 'don't be evil', no one will care.
Hate to say it, but no one will remember or care when that time comes. It costs them very little to say that if they have no plans in the immediate future to serve ads.
> Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.
This is a glaring admission ChatGPT is a poor man's Claude in the literal sense.
I will never understand these chronically online CEOs. Your company has given up its massive lead in AI and is falling further behind Google and Anthropic with every passing day and you have nothing better to do than fight ego battles with random people on X all day? Should be a clear signal to the board that there needs to be a shake up at the top.
It's influencer marketing. These 'ego battles' are a show to keep their brand in front of you. It's engaging like reality television. This is very valuable, especially for companies that need to fund their growth through investment and grants.
I think OP could be just as astute as you meant. They probably know that Altman is engaging in marketing, but still tried to make a case that it shouldn't be a good strategy and instead illustrates his character. Not that I disagree, as people could see the unnecessary drama as a sign of immature behavior and a negative net result in the long term, regardless if it generates press today. As many other commenters remarked, they will from now think twice about trusting Altman's ventures in the future in light of this long-winded tweet.
I'm not sure what your point is. High P/E is a sign of overvaluation and a bad investment. Just because the market is irrational doesn't mean you should sign up for to be a bag holder.
Pretty sure OPs point is that Tesla has shitty results, has a CEO that lives “any publicity is good publicity” as a mantra and the company valuation is through the roof.
The instant feedback you get from posting on social media is more gratifying/addicting than any other marketing campaign. That's what drives all these CEOs, in my opinion.
I've said before, and I stand by it: Judging by the fact that many CEOs of these BigCos are often the leaders of several other companies, the CEO job probably isn't that hard.
My dad used to have a boss (at the VP level) who he pejoratively nicknamed "VPGPT", because he thought the guy's management was not significantly better or even different than what you'd get from ChatGPT.
1) Those Anthropic ads don't matter. Companies eat up their promises all the time and rarely face any consequence. They'll introduce ads one way or another.
2) Sam Altman's tweets don't matter. They never matter. Tweets from any OpenAI employee are purely to pump engagement. If what they said had a sliver of substance we would have had AGI mid-2025.
The whole 'war' is just to keep their brands mentioned on news and social media.
That line stood out to me too. I don’t care about any of these companies but one of them accusing another of being authoritarian and a “dark path” is quite ironic.
> We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.
> One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.
It’s one thing to say your competitors are hypocrites they will have ads one day, just watch. But democratic vs authoritarian? Come on. What is next? They are Chinese spies and Russian agents? Smh
I can't shake the feeling of being spoken to by Gríma Wormtongue. It's just the way Sam talks. The words and phrases he chooses. So much tortured persuasion in all he says.
I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:
"More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.)"
Why the incumbent BigCo AI CEO -- who has more Texans using their product than apparently Claude's entire US userbase -- needs to or rather is choosing to be using zingers to make a rebuttal about a competitor's ads is much more interesting than the content of the message itself... which is mostly corporate feelgood slop.
Is OpenAI's runway actually as bad as the doomers like Ed Zitron think it is? Is OpenAI's deal with NVIDIA actually on ice? Are they seeing something in the subscription data that is troubling? Maybe it's nothing and SamA just felt like doing some dunking on twitter today. Or maybe the stress levels around running openAI have increased.
I previously thought OpenAI was going to be fine and the doomers were wrong. I still think the race is theirs to lose since they have very strong branding and userbase right now. But this is a very weak signal that gives me more pause about OpenAI's future than any of the doomsayer articles have.
I give a slightly higher weight to my psychoanalysis of the company's CEO's actions because none of the doomer articles have access to material nonpublic information or company internals to truly opine on the financial health of a multibillion dollar enterprise.
> I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:
That zinger seemed similar to how Trump deals with criticism from the media -- he tends to begin with an attack on the ratings / popularity of the speaker.
Sam is not having a good week, Nvidia potentially backing out of a 100 billion dollar “commitment”, now looking a fool for getting butt hurt because a company is trying to gain market share via marketing. Looking awfully pathetic
The guy's a master of spin, no doubt. I don't know how you start out with the concept of ads in AI chatbots and end with "This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them." What a bunch of generic nonsense... and yet people lap it up like puppy dogs.
He sounds rattled, you don't respond in this manner from the position of power. They didn't need to respond at all, all they did opening their mouth is bring more eyes to Anthropic.
Ads will expand to fill all online spaces. Ads will inevitably come to both, it's just a matter of when they respectively need or decide to capture that profit and when they feel their users are sufficiently dependent so as not to be able to leave.
The first fundraising banner on wikipedia was in 2003. That is unquestionably an advertisement, and not even an ethical one given the misleading nature of their campaigns these days.
I don't think it takes pedantry to think advertising in order to solicit funds for a non-profit is still advertising.
If anything the criteria I would apply is does it diminish the user experience while attempting to motivate the viewer to act in a manner that benefits the advertiser.
May I ask why you do not consider it advertising? Is it because it is asking for donations? Because it is a non-profit? If so, why would those factors exempt them?
Does it? Claude the chatbot is available for free, and it can write code, but Claude Code is a separate product that as far as I know is only available on paid plans. Source: https://claude.com/product/claude-code
A supremely weak move, perhaps sama didn't learn anything from being on reddit and watching how online discourse doesn't ever favour the defensive ones.
There was absolutely no need to come out publicly with such whiny remarks, it's marketing, as the CEO I'd expect much better than that, he should know that it doesn't help at all. Even more since the ad was funny, coming out with dry remarks about the obvious misrepresentation made as a joke is frankly a bit pathetic.
Losing move but the interesting part is: why? Something hit a nerve, maybe it's a sign of some buildup of stress from overcommitments? I cannot understand...
I think it's all he knows. His "oh, shucks" good-boy routine is what he's been doing for 15 years now, it's gotten him far, it's never been genuine, but it feels especially out of place now with much attention on him and his lies being so obvious.
your daily Streisand effect:
* https://youtu.be/FBSam25u8O4
* https://youtu.be/De-_wQpKw0s
* https://youtu.be/kQRu7DdTTVA
* https://youtu.be/3sVD3aG_azw
Hope the dude is ok, can't imagine getting so offended by these ads
I hadn't watched these before, but wow the AI wars are no joke. "Betrayal", "Deception", "Violation", "Treachery"... It's like the Cola Wars, but 10x more personal.
This is hilarious. I did not know until now. Black mirror episode for this era is staying with ads :)
These videos have high chance of aging like milk... We'll see what Anthropic does 10 years from now. Remember "don't be evil"
It was bullshit then, it’s bullshit now.
I pay ChatGPT 20 bucks a month, or whatever the subscription is. I get massive value out of this, Sam Altman is paying for my computing power. I’m paying a tenth(or less) of what the actual price is. Once that no longer applies, I will ditch ChatGPT and probably build my own LLM computer.
So thanks Sam for giving me cheap computing power.
At least he can't levy arbitrary and capricous tariffs because a commercial upset his fragile ego
Well played Anthropic!
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“ we believe access creates agency”
Whose agency? Ads are designed to reduce agency. It’s a red queen’s race from there. It leads to a high level of optimized manipulation and intrusiveness.
That was one of the core points of anthropic’s article.
sama is right that anthropic’s and openai’s businesses are differently shaped. Thank goodness for that.
Maybe Altman is talking about creating ad agencies?
If he had any sense he'd buy the one that did these.
Ads can either reduce agency or increase it. You can get useful information from ads. It's just got a low payoff, in many cases.
Good distinction, I agree. The core issue is the information asymmetry and its profitability.
Anthropic’s strategy is weird, they may not be inserting ads today but I am sure this is where they will end up if they get enough volume of users. So saying “not to Claude” is putting them in the same plane as google’s “do no evil”. They will walk it back sooner or later.
It's the same ad campaign Samsung did with the charger and headphone jack after Apple ditched them. Let's see if they hold out longer than what Samsung did back then.
PlayStation also used this style of ad when Xbox first tried to go all digital.
When they change Claude's name, you know all the old promises are getting broken.
Claude's side it's catering to professionals, and making paid produ
'Not to Claude' is a great slogan for 2026; let's see if it survives 2028
Sometimes quality is worth it over quantity of users.
The free to paid user ratio of both services is worth seeing too.
Personally I find both are growing cleanly into their own areas of strengths and that's actually a good thing because it provides more coverage for solutions.
they won’t walk it back cause no one will remember it
> Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.
But they are paying, aren't they?
Advertisements don't generate money from thin air. Advertisements cause people to spend money they otherwise would not have spent. That's why companies buy ads in the first place.
And if you're showing ads to poor people, you're probably causing them to spend money they don't have.
Yeah the whole cognitive disconnect that advertising is anything other than serving an expensive product to rich people deserves a smirk at minimum.
It's a bit more complicated. On average, someone is paying, but averages can be misleading. As we see with free-to-play games, whales can subsidize a lot of usage by other people who don't pay a thing.
It seems like the same is true of advertising. Yes, some people are spending money but it doesn't necessarily follow that they're people who can't afford it.
Not a fan of Altman, but I don't think the ad will serve Anthropic well in long run.
They may not run ads for foreseeable future, but there will come a point where they introduce a different tier service that does, whether they want it or not.
Their investors will call the shot.
It doesn’t matter. Companies are hypocritical all the time, a few people make noise at the time, then it’s forgotten.
You're right. As long as they don't make a long series of these ads and espouse it as a virtue like Google did with their 'don't be evil', no one will care.
Do you think Google suffered any consequences for ignoring their "Don't be evil" motto?
No one cared about Google's doing, either, to any material degree.
[dead]
Hate to say it, but no one will remember or care when that time comes. It costs them very little to say that if they have no plans in the immediate future to serve ads.
> Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.
This is a glaring admission ChatGPT is a poor man's Claude in the literal sense.
I literally opened Claude’s website to check for prices. I ain’t rich but I’m not really trying to go with the poor man’s AI.
I will never understand these chronically online CEOs. Your company has given up its massive lead in AI and is falling further behind Google and Anthropic with every passing day and you have nothing better to do than fight ego battles with random people on X all day? Should be a clear signal to the board that there needs to be a shake up at the top.
It's influencer marketing. These 'ego battles' are a show to keep their brand in front of you. It's engaging like reality television. This is very valuable, especially for companies that need to fund their growth through investment and grants.
I wish more people were as astute.
The front matter of big politics and big tech is not too different from professional wrestling.
I think OP could be just as astute as you meant. They probably know that Altman is engaging in marketing, but still tried to make a case that it shouldn't be a good strategy and instead illustrates his character. Not that I disagree, as people could see the unnecessary drama as a sign of immature behavior and a negative net result in the long term, regardless if it generates press today. As many other commenters remarked, they will from now think twice about trusting Altman's ventures in the future in light of this long-winded tweet.
It's not that deep, he's not even writing it
This smells a lot of "any publicity is good publicity", which has been false for more than a decade. You know what makes line go up? Results.
OK.
Tesla Trailing P/E: 390.70 Apple Trailing P/E: 34.11 Ford Trailing P/E : 11.74
Perception and execution that is what i call P/E
I'm not sure what your point is. High P/E is a sign of overvaluation and a bad investment. Just because the market is irrational doesn't mean you should sign up for to be a bag holder.
Pretty sure OPs point is that Tesla has shitty results, has a CEO that lives “any publicity is good publicity” as a mantra and the company valuation is through the roof.
Yes and none of those are good things.
We live in an era where attention matters more than reality. Chronically online CEOs are aware of this.
Om Malik has been writing about this recently, especially regarding OpenAI / Altman [1], but you can see it everywhere.
1 - https://om.co/2026/02/02/openai-and-the-announcement-economy...
It would take a fiasco for such a shake up to happen given how the last attempt went.
They already got a clear signal when they fired him. It's baffling that they did an about face when the red flags were all there.
Well, when the board tried to fire him, he replaced them. Makes this part of the tweet all the funnier:
> One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.
The instant feedback you get from posting on social media is more gratifying/addicting than any other marketing campaign. That's what drives all these CEOs, in my opinion.
I've said before, and I stand by it: Judging by the fact that many CEOs of these BigCos are often the leaders of several other companies, the CEO job probably isn't that hard.
Altman said himself that he felt useless compared to Codex, so maybe Codex should just run the company. It would certainly be cheaper.
My dad used to have a boss (at the VP level) who he pejoratively nicknamed "VPGPT", because he thought the guy's management was not significantly better or even different than what you'd get from ChatGPT.
He's a narcissist and has to defend his ego
This is really, really bad for OpenAI; both these ads (which are very good) and Sam's response.
Completely absent of substance
It appears now that zero, with your zero added, has created a final total sum of zero as well.
No one should care.
Seriously, we all know:
1) Those Anthropic ads don't matter. Companies eat up their promises all the time and rarely face any consequence. They'll introduce ads one way or another.
2) Sam Altman's tweets don't matter. They never matter. Tweets from any OpenAI employee are purely to pump engagement. If what they said had a sliver of substance we would have had AGI mid-2025.
The whole 'war' is just to keep their brands mentioned on news and social media.
"One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path."
OpenAI President Greg Brockman was the biggest donor to Trump's super PAC in H2 2025, donating $25M https://www.techmeme.com/260102/p10#a260102p10
That line stood out to me too. I don’t care about any of these companies but one of them accusing another of being authoritarian and a “dark path” is quite ironic.
You could interpret it as saying that it's going to take two authoritarian companies . . .
> We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.
> One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.
It’s one thing to say your competitors are hypocrites they will have ads one day, just watch. But democratic vs authoritarian? Come on. What is next? They are Chinese spies and Russian agents? Smh
So Spam Altham admits in the first paragraph they are bringing ADS to ChatGPT and then whines about his competition the rest of the article.
I can't shake the feeling of being spoken to by Gríma Wormtongue. It's just the way Sam talks. The words and phrases he chooses. So much tortured persuasion in all he says.
I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:
"More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.)"
Why the incumbent BigCo AI CEO -- who has more Texans using their product than apparently Claude's entire US userbase -- needs to or rather is choosing to be using zingers to make a rebuttal about a competitor's ads is much more interesting than the content of the message itself... which is mostly corporate feelgood slop.
Is OpenAI's runway actually as bad as the doomers like Ed Zitron think it is? Is OpenAI's deal with NVIDIA actually on ice? Are they seeing something in the subscription data that is troubling? Maybe it's nothing and SamA just felt like doing some dunking on twitter today. Or maybe the stress levels around running openAI have increased.
I previously thought OpenAI was going to be fine and the doomers were wrong. I still think the race is theirs to lose since they have very strong branding and userbase right now. But this is a very weak signal that gives me more pause about OpenAI's future than any of the doomsayer articles have.
I give a slightly higher weight to my psychoanalysis of the company's CEO's actions because none of the doomer articles have access to material nonpublic information or company internals to truly opine on the financial health of a multibillion dollar enterprise.
> I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:
That zinger seemed similar to how Trump deals with criticism from the media -- he tends to begin with an attack on the ratings / popularity of the speaker.
the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46892904
Sam is not having a good week, Nvidia potentially backing out of a 100 billion dollar “commitment”, now looking a fool for getting butt hurt because a company is trying to gain market share via marketing. Looking awfully pathetic
The guy's a master of spin, no doubt. I don't know how you start out with the concept of ads in AI chatbots and end with "This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them." What a bunch of generic nonsense... and yet people lap it up like puppy dogs.
He sounds rattled, you don't respond in this manner from the position of power. They didn't need to respond at all, all they did opening their mouth is bring more eyes to Anthropic.
Super-peeved. The intro with the "they're funny and I laughed." and then loses face attacking back...
IDK if it was the right move to complain that a competitor won't license their competing software to your company.
Yeah that was telling as to why he was having this fit it seems.
Ads will expand to fill all online spaces. Ads will inevitably come to both, it's just a matter of when they respectively need or decide to capture that profit and when they feel their users are sufficiently dependent so as not to be able to leave.
No ads on Wikipedia tho, not even after 25 years.
The first fundraising banner on wikipedia was in 2003. That is unquestionably an advertisement, and not even an ethical one given the misleading nature of their campaigns these days.
I’m going to say this is a different ballpark. They are fundraising for themselves.. on their own website..
That’s quite different from shoving ads in your face where it doesn’t belong. Like an ad for Copilot on a YouTube video.
IMO it’s distinct.
never thought I’d see fundraising compared to ads but here we are… :)
Do you not think those intrusive banners and popups implying that Wikipedia is about to imminently go broke unless you give them money, are ads?
I think you're letting pedantry hinder you from seeing a useful pattern.
I shall take that as a no, then.
I don't think it takes pedantry to think advertising in order to solicit funds for a non-profit is still advertising.
If anything the criteria I would apply is does it diminish the user experience while attempting to motivate the viewer to act in a manner that benefits the advertiser.
May I ask why you do not consider it advertising? Is it because it is asking for donations? Because it is a non-profit? If so, why would those factors exempt them?
I am certainly not alone in thinking their fundraising campaigns are intrusive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175098
Related:
Claude Is a Space to Think
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884883
Is he claiming that Anthropic doesn't have a free Claude Code? Because it does.
Does it? Claude the chatbot is available for free, and it can write code, but Claude Code is a separate product that as far as I know is only available on paid plans. Source: https://claude.com/product/claude-code
A supremely weak move, perhaps sama didn't learn anything from being on reddit and watching how online discourse doesn't ever favour the defensive ones.
There was absolutely no need to come out publicly with such whiny remarks, it's marketing, as the CEO I'd expect much better than that, he should know that it doesn't help at all. Even more since the ad was funny, coming out with dry remarks about the obvious misrepresentation made as a joke is frankly a bit pathetic.
Losing move but the interesting part is: why? Something hit a nerve, maybe it's a sign of some buildup of stress from overcommitments? I cannot understand...
I think it's all he knows. His "oh, shucks" good-boy routine is what he's been doing for 15 years now, it's gotten him far, it's never been genuine, but it feels especially out of place now with much attention on him and his lies being so obvious.
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What is this site? A view into X or a new social media site?
The former
> One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own
Says the guy trying to buy high resolution scans of people's eyeballs for $25 a pop.
Okay dude.
Hit a nerve huh?