Anthropic is focused on growing its business rather than making “flashy headlines,” its commercial chief told CNBC in a thinly-veiled swipe at rival OpenAI as the public war of words between the AI giants continues.
Anthropic aired ads at Sunday’s Super Bowl taking a dig at OpenAI’s decision to begin testing ads on ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Anthropic’s ad “deceptive.” It comes as the leading AI model players are locked in an intensifying battle to sign up businesses to use their products.
In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, Smith also said the market sell-off in software stocks, sparked by Anthropic’s Claude Cowork tool, was “a lot of hyperbole.”
Anthropic spent millions on its Super Bowl commercials, a 60-second pregame ad and a 30-second in-game ad, which stressed said: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
Smith told CNBC it was a “conscious decision” not to include ads in Claude. Advertising would take Anthropic in “directions where you’re optimizing for the wrong things,” he said. He added that, without ads, the company can focus on areas such as making AI models more intelligent and being “genuinely helpful, safe, and trusted.”
