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By Joshua Rhett Miller
Senior Reporter
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As the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots tweak last-minute game plans, two AI behemoths are clashing publicly with competing commercials during Sunday's Super Bowl.
Anthropic, which vows to build AI to "serve humanity’s long-term well-being," unveiled a series of spots on Wednesday, including two slated to run during coverage of Super Bowl LX to highlight that users won't see advertisements while using its Claude chatbot.
"Hey, can I get a six-pack quickly?" a man in search of fitness tips says in one 30-second commercial.
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A smiling, hulking man then affirms he can help—before quickly morphing into a pitchman hawking one-inch insoles.
"Ads are coming to AI," Anthropic's spot exclaims. "But not to Claude."
Anthropic's bold and pricy pitches—some 30-second spots to air during Sunday's game were reportedly sold for a record $10 million—signify a new season of sorts as the company's first Super Bowl campaign. The commercials also come just weeks after rival OpenAI began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of ChatGPT.
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Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI accused Anthropic of misleading the public while criticizing the company's approach.
"First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed," Altman posted on X Wednesday. "But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that."
Altman, 40, claimed the approach was "on brand for Anthropic doublespeak," adding he didn't expect to see such an advertisement from OpenAI's competitor during the Super Bowl.
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"More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency," Altman continued. "More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do."
Altman also accused Anthropic of serving an "expensive product to rich people" while positioning OpenAI as an alternative.
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"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," Altman wrote Wednesday.
Altman responded at length to Anthropic's Super Bowl campaign because "there's a really important underlying principle at stake here," company officials told CNN.
"We actually are using advertising to make sure we’re expanding the democratic access to [ChatGPT],” Open AI Vice President of Global Affair Chris Lehane said. "And so sure, if you want to question advertising, fine, but you’re effectively questioning democratic access."
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OpenAI, which aired a Super Bowl spot last year, plans to run another commercial on Sunday.
"As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything," Altman wrote Wednesday.
Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI researchers, has positioned itself as a safety-focused AI firm aiming to build "reliable, interpretable and steerable" systems.
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"There are many good places for advertising," Anthropic announced in an accompanying blogpost Wednesday. "There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them."
The company acknowledged that approach could change, however.
"We continue to invest in our smaller models so that our free offering remains at the frontier of intelligence, and we may consider lower-cost subscription tiers and regional pricing where there is clear demand for it," Anthropic's post continued. "Should we need to revisit this approach, we’ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so."
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More than 127 million people watched Super Bowl LIX last year and a poll conducted Friday found that 20 percent of Americans consider commercials their favorite part of the broadcast. Thirty percent of respondents said the "game itself," followed by "none of it" at 23 percent. Another 20 percent said they enjoyed the game's elaborate halftime show, according to the YouGov survey.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, meanwhile, has warned that humanity is entering a dangerous phase of AI development and lacks institutional maturity to handle the ensuing crush.
"Humanity needs to wake up," Amodei wrote in an essay last month.
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