Sam Altman Responds to Anthropic Ad Campaign
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Learning: Marketing and Legal team are not in sync with each other.
Sam's goal is to create viral products. This has always been his goal. While his interest in and passion for AI are almost certainly genuine, he famously hedged his bets before committing to OpenAI up to the point of being ambiguously fired from his previous job. ChatGPT was one of the greatest viral products of all time. His subsequent attempts to create virality haven't been working in any real, durable way.
Enter Claude Code. It went viral, not in the awe-inspiring world-changing way that ChatGPT did, but in a way that allowed it to decisively overwhelm OpenAI's advantage in some very valuable niches. It wasn't born out of a search for a viral product, but rather out of an intellectual obsession with safe, steerable AI systems -- an obsession that could've just as easily ended up producing no products at all. It's the kind of obsession that can't be replicated if the only motive is virality.
So yeah, this is going to bother him a lot. He's defending ads while his competitor's product is having its "iPhone moment." You know this is part of the raw emotional driver because he ends his defense of ads by talking about Codex app downloads and saying he "believe[s] Codex is going to win," implying that significant doubt exists that he feels the need to correct.
It warms my heart to hear that Sam is against authoritarianism. Hopefully he doesn't hang out with anyone that supports that kind of thing.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-real-story-behind-sam-altman...
I think Sam would have been far better off to let this lie. I’m not at all sure of the nature of the ads coming in chatgpt but by responding so personally and aggressively to what appears to be sillyness feels like they hit a bit close to home?
While the Anthropic ads might be a hit amongst nerds, it won't compel normies to use Claude over ChatGPT, and in fact, it may just be damaging to AI adoption overall as it presents bad taste examples of how corruptible it all is.
Maybe there's a predictive market gamble starting about how long it will take Claude to follow suit if OpenAI starts making 9 figures in ad revenue.
If Anthropic is positioned as "thing for professionals to do professional work" then I think you just avoid this issue entirely. Fee for service. OpenAI trying to be the thing everyone is using won't work in that model, though.
I do pay extra for privacy and quality.
Enshittified LLMs are not something I’m interested in.
That would favorably contrast ChatGPT's products, pricing, and market size with Claude's.
Instead, well, it's not a good look.
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes it feels like Sam does not actually want to aid others in achieving this outcome.
While I found the golden dating app the funniest anc creepiest, credit loan ad was the most viewed for a reason: it's the most profitable ad from the scenarios, and it will come in a few years.
I write all this as a mostly happy OpenAI subscriber (my only wish is still being able to have a sticky legacy o3 model as my default for my Pro subscription everywhere).
Mr. Dishonest accusing others of being dishonest.
> More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency.
I think you meant "psychological dependence", not agency.
Google though... they make fake ad Emails so fake ad Replies seems exactly like their style.
Anthropic has a clear vision, they want to build the best agentic models so they can build products for humans to use like Claude Cowork, and Claude Code.
Google has a clear vision, they want to build the smartest model possible to give to consumers to use and to implement into their products.
OpenAI doesn't have any vision. GPT 5.2 alone has 5 different version that are all essentially the same. They are slow, take forever to do anything, and aren't smart in any area. They released Sora then just forgot about like everyone did. They released Atlas and forgot abotu like everyone did. They release GPT Image which honestly is probably the main reason they still have users they have.
They honestly might be in trouble, Oracle is fucking themselves over with the amount of debt they have to build out infrastructure for them. Microsoft and Nvidia are backing away from putting more eggs in the basket.
It actually no surprise they are trying to find every way to make money because if they don't they might be the first to fall.
Anthropic might not be winning the consumers, but it almost like you don't want to win consumers yet until you figure out how to make enough money to support them as Anthropic and OpenAI don't have business producing 100b in net income every year.