Ads in Chatbots Have Arrived. Here’s What’s Working—and What’s Not

Anthropic is holding firm on the pledge made in its Super Bowl commercial this year to keep Claude ad-free. The company’s recent IPO filing didn’t even mention the possibility of selling ads to make money from the AI chatbot. It’s easy to maintain the high ground with about $112 billion in investor cash.

The chatbot industry, though, may find selling ads necessary to defray the high costs of generating AI responses. OpenAI is all in, with over 100,000 customers advertising in ChatGPT since ads debuted there in February. Last week, Google expanded ads in its search chatbot AI Mode to 10 more countries beyond the US and declared that users “find them highly relevant.” Advertisers are far from satisfied with the experience, but they expect it to improve.