Anthropic has taken Apple’s strategy against Microsoft to the Super Bowl: making using the rival look ridiculous

Anthropic has opened the Super Bowl by attacking OpenAI with ads that show virtual therapists advertising dating apps and personal trainers selling boosts for short people. The message: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude“(“The ads are reaching the AI. But not Claude.”)

Sam Altman has responded in X calling them “dishonest” and accusing them of “doublespeak“, “double speech” in Spanish, although a better adapted translation could be “deceptive language” or simply “hypocrisy.”

It seems like a minor skirmish, two rivals fighting over an advertisement. But under that hood is a billion-dollar question: What kind of business will AI be when it’s established?

The history of the Internet is summarized in two great models:

1. One free supported by advertising: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok… regardless of whether they have premium versions.
2. Other direct payment by subscription: Netflix, DAZN, Disney+, Apple Music, PSN…

The first aims to maximize the audience, the second aims to maximize the revenue per user. The AI ​​is right now deciding which of the two paths it takes.

OpenAI has already chosen and is starting to test putting ads on free ChatGPT accounts. Altman justifies it with the classic argument of democratization: “More Texans use free ChatGPT than the total number of people using Claude in the United States.” In other words: they want to reach those billions of people who are not going to pay 20 dollars a month. And for that you need advertising.

Anthropic chooses the opposite. “Anthropic offers an expensive product to rich people,” Altman reproaches him. In a way, it is true: Claude is betting above all on contracts with companies and premium subscriptions of 20, 100 and 200 dollars per month.

Their model depends on the AI ​​being valuable enough for you to pay for it. And so that you look from time to time to the higher plan with the temptation to go up one more step. Without advertising, without sponsored links and without responses being influenced by advertisers.

The difference is not only business, it is product. An AI with advertising has different incentives than one without it.

• What happens when you ask the assistant what car to buy you and there is a manufacturer paying to appear in their answers?
• What about medical, financial, legal advice?

OpenAI has promised that “ads do not influence responses.” That’s what he said in minute 0. But that promise will be increasingly difficult to sustain as monetization pressure increases.

Anthropic has its own problem: If it only reaches those who can afford to pay, AI becomes a tool of the elites. A technology that promises to democratize knowledge ends up reproducing the class divisions that already exist. We saw this coming with the arrival of $200 plans to access the AI ​​elite. A gap that creates another gap,

The parallel with the history of the Internet is inevitable. Free social networks caught (almost) all of us in the 1910s, but in return they built advertising surveillance machines optimized for the engagementnot for anyone’s well-being. Payment services are cleaner, but also more exclusive.

So AI is now at that bifurcation point:

• OpenAI is committed to being the YouTube of AI: free for everyone, supported by ads and with premium versions for those who want to pay.
• Anthropic wants to be the Netflix: better experience and free of ads, but only for those who pay. It is true that it maintains a free plan, but its limits are a continuous invitation to check out or leave.

And now it’s up for grabs What kind of relationship with those machines that know more and more about us and from which we ask more and more?. Whether they will be services that serve us or whether they will be platforms that monetize us.

In Xataka | The AI ​​of 2026 brings an uncomfortable truth: the most useful will be the one that watches us the most

Featured image | Anthropic

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The news

Anthropic has taken Apple’s strategy against Microsoft to the Super Bowl: making using the rival look ridiculous

was originally published in

Xataka

by
Javier Lacort

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