Yesterday’s Super Bowl offered more than a Seattle Seahawks win, a halftime performance from Bad Bunny, and beer ads. This year’s annual football extravaganza provided a vivid snapshot of how the long-running AI rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic has erupted into a much noisier contest over perception, positioning, and power.
For the first time, Anthropic spent millions of dollars on several satiric Super Bowl spots. The ads had the headlines “Deception,” “Betrayal,” “Treachery,” and “Violation,” and all carried the tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” While the ads did not mention OpenAI by name, they were obviously a pointed jab at OpenAI’s plans to sell ads inside ChatGPT, and the ads pointed out that Anthropic has committed to keeping its Claude chatbot ad-free. OpenAI’s leadership pushed back publicly, defending its strategy and airing its own more earnest Super Bowl ad that showcased its Codex tool, centered on “builders”—pushing the idea that anyone can build with AI.
The social media noise around the ads grew so loud in advance of the game that the feud spilled over into trolling and misinformation. Fabricated headlines began circulating on X, claiming last-minute changes to OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad—spurring OpenAI president Greg Brockman to call a Reddit post “fake news” and company chief marketing officer Kate Rouch to call out an X post about a supposed story in the trade publication Ad Age that said OpenAI altered its Super Bowl ad at the last minute as a “fake headline and entire fake website.” (Which it was. The Ad Age reporter whose byline was supposedly on the story also took to social media to say she had not written the article.) Meanwhile, technology show TBPN lobbed its own made-up “news” into the X-sphere with Claude With Ads, a parody website.
