In brief
- OpenAI kicked off a limited U.S. ad test for free and Go tier users.
- The company says ads are labeled, separate from chatbot responses, and won’t affect answers.
- The monetization shift comes amid mounting losses and rising competition from companies like Google and Anthropic.
OpenAI started testing advertisements in ChatGPT on Monday, just hours after rival Anthropic ran Super Bowl commercials mocking the very idea of ads in AI assistants.
“We’re starting to roll out a test for ads in ChatGPT today to a subset of free and Go users in the U.S,” OpenAI said in an official announcement. “Ads are labeled as sponsored and visually separate from the response.”
Free users and subscribers to the $8-per-month ChatGPT Go tier started seeing sponsored content at the bottom of responses.
Before this, ChatGPT didn’t show ads, per se. Instead it showed direct links to specific products based on what the user was looking for. Once a person clicked on any of these products, the links presented their own tracker, letting servers know this is a direct referral from ChatGPT.
Why ads make sense
The launch represents an abrupt shift for CEO Sam Altman, who called ads in AI “uniquely unsettling” in a 2024 interview and described advertising as a “last resort” business model for ChatGPT. But the company burned through $8 billion in 2025, according to internal documents reviewed by Fortune, with projected losses reaching $74 billion by 2028.
Anthropic capitalized on the moment with Super Bowl commercials that ridiculed the premise. One spot showed a fitness question veering into an unsolicited pitch for shoe insoles. Another featured an ad for a mature dating service appearing during a conversation about improving communication with one’s mother. The tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
Altman fired back on X, calling the ads “funny” but “clearly dishonest.” He argued that OpenAI “would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them” and accused Anthropic of wanting to “control what people do with AI” while serving “an expensive product to rich people.”
Of course, the response generated huge backlash, with users mocking Altman for replying to a comic ad with a statement using corporate language.
OpenAI framed the rollout as a “test” rather than an official launch, suggesting implementation details may still change. The company promises ads won’t influence ChatGPT’s answers and won’t appear for users under 18 or near sensitive topics like health, mental health, or politics. And Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions remain ad-free.
“Ads will be clearly labeled and shown separately from ChatGPT’s responses, so it’s always clear what’s an ad and what’s an answer,” OpenAI said in a help post explaining how the strategy will work.
The financial pressure is mounting from multiple directions. Only 5% of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users pay for subscriptions, while the company has committed over $1.4 trillion to infrastructure spending through the early 2030s. Meanwhile, ChatGPT’s market share dropped from 87% in January 2025 to around 65% this month, while Google Gemini surged from 5% to over 18%, according to Similarweb data.
Altman acknowledged the competitive pressure in an internal Slack message to employees Monday, stating that ChatGPT is “back to exceeding 10% monthly growth.” OpenAI is also in the final stages of securing up to $100 billion in new funding, the Wall Street Journal recently reported, with contributions from Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon (reportedly up to $50 billion), and another $30 billion from SoftBank.
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