I think this says a lot about the business approach of Anthopic compared to OpenAI. Just the vast amount of free messages you get from OpenAI is crazy that turning a profit with that seems impossible. Anthropic is growing more slowly but it seems like they are not running a crazy deficit. They do not need to put ads or porn in their chatbot
> Anthropic is focused on businesses, developers, and helping our users flourish. Our business model is straightforward: we generate revenue through enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions, and we reinvest that revenue into improving Claude for our users. This is a choice with tradeoffs, and we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions.
Very diplomatic of them to say "we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions" while also taking a dig at OpenAI on their youtube channel
I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.
It appears they trend in the right direction:
- Have not kissed the Ring.
- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).
- Committing to no ads.
- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]
The things that are concerning:
- Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])
It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.
I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?
>I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.
There are no good guys, Anthropic is one of the worst of the AI companies. Their CEO is continuously threatening all of the white collar workers, they have engineering playing the 100x engineer game on Xitter. They work with Palantir and support ICE. If anything, chinese companies are ethically better at this point.
In Poland, before the last presidential election, a member of one candidate’s campaign team had a moment of accidental honesty. Asked whether his candidate would pledge not to raise taxes after winning, he replied: “Well, what’s the harm in promising?”
Anthropic was founded by OpenAI defectors who said OpenAI's product strategy was too dangerous and needed more safety research. But in reality Anthropic has almost exactly the same product strategy. A lot of this is just marketing to raise money to make the founders billionaires rather than the multi-millionaires they only would've been if they hadn't founded a competitor.
No one who believes this should be in any position of authority in the AI space. Anthropic's marketing BS has basically been taken as fact on this website since they started and it's just so tiring to watch this industry fall for the same nonsense over and over and over again.
Anthropic is younger. That's why they're not doing ads. As soon as they actually reach the spending to (not) reach their AGI goals they will start running ads and begging the taxpayer for even more money.
> - Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]
> The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
Dude, you cannot put these two sentences together. The defense department was either a fluke or a PR stunt. If they partner with Palintir they absolutely do not care that their tech is going to be used for killing and other horrible deeds.
A company with morals (which does not exist BTW) would never partner with Palintir.
I always find the CEO using hype and fear as his marketing strategy.
A year ago, he came out and said, "Blood-bath" for white collar jobs.
It seems to create some sense of anxiety in the receiving end.
So apparently they're going to run a Super Bowl ad about ChatGPT having ads (without saying ChatGPT of course)........ Has doing an ad that focuses only on something about your competitor ever been the best play? Talk about yourself.
Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns, like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that narrative?
I always found Anthropic to be trying hard to signal as one of the "good guys".
I wonder how they can get away without showing Ads when ChatGPT has to be doing it. Will the enterprise business be that profitable that Ads are not required?
Maybe OpenAI is going for something different - democratising access to vast majority of the people. Remember that ChatGPT is what people know about and what people use the free version of.
Who's to say that making Ads by doing this but also prodiding more access is the wrong choice?
Also, Claude holds nothing against ChatGPT in search. From my previous experiences, ChatGPT is just way better at deep searches through the internet than Claude.
What other interaction models exist for Claude given that Anthropic seems to be stressing so much that this is for "conversations"?
(Props for them for doing this, don't know how this is long-term sustainable for them though ... especially given they want to IPO and there will be huge revenue/margin pressures)
What makes Anthropic seem like early Apple is not just the unique taste, but the courage to stand firm with their vision of what the product should be.
This will be an amusing post to revisit in the internet archives when or if they do introduce ads in the future but dressed up in a different presentation and naming. Ultimately the investors will come calling.
Besides the editorial control -which openai openly flagged to want to remain unbiased- there is a deeper issue with ads-based revenue models in AI: that of margins. If you want ads to cover compute & make margins -looking at roughly $50 ARPU at mature FB/GOOG level- you have two levers: sell more advertisement, or offer dumber models.
This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn), they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and went with claude.
This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!) with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects against businesses optimizing for intelligence.
I appreciate taking a stance, even if nobody is asking. It would be great if it was less of a bad faith effort.
It's great that Anthropic is targeting the businesses of the world. It's a little insincere to than declare "no ads", as if that decision would obviously be the same if the bulk of their (not paying) users.
There are, as far as ads go, perfectly fine opportunities to do them in a limited way for limited things within chatbots. I don't know who they think they are helping by highlighting how to do it poorly.
I feel like they are picking a lane. ChatGPT is great for chatbots and the like, but, as was discussed in a prior thread, chatbots aren't the end-all-be-all of AI or LLMs. Claude Code is the workhorse for me and most folks I know for AI assisted development and business automation type tasks. Meanwhile, most folks I know who use ChatGPT are really replacing Google Search. This is where folks are trying to create llm.txt files to become more discoverable by ChatGPT specifically.
For Anthropic to be proactive in saying they will not pursue ad based revenue I think is not just "one of the good guys" but that they may be stabilizing on a business model of both seat and usage based subscriptions.
Either way, both companies are hemorrhaging money.
> ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.
Yeah I remember when Google used to be like this. Then today I tried to go to 39dollarglasses.com and accidentally went to the top search result which was actually an ad for some other company. Arrrg.
Agreed on using both. I definitely know people who prefer Codex or Cursor. It's probably Coke or Pepsi at this point. I tend to prefer Claude Code, but that's just me.
Claude have posted on number of very sarcastic videos on twitter that take a jibe at ads https://x.com/claudeai/status/2019071118036942999 with an ending line "Ads are coming to IA. But not to Claude."
I asked for this last week in an hn comment and people were pretty negative about it in the replies.
But I’m happy with position and will cancel my ChatGPT and push my family towards Claude for most things. This taste effect is what I think pushes apple devices into households. Power users making endorsements.
And I think that excess margin is enough to get past lowered ad revenue opportunity.
They are not trying to sell adds. They are trying to sell themselves as a
monthly service. That is what I think when they are trying to convince me to go there to think. I rather go think at Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is, of course very useful, but what it’s not good at is surfacing information I am unfamiliar with. Part of this problem is that Wikipedia editors are more similar to me, and more interested in similar things to me, than the average person writing text that appears online. Part of the problem is that the design of Wikipedia does not make it easy to stumble upon unexpected information; most links are to adjacent topics given they have to be relevant to the current article. But regardless, I’m much more likely to come across a novel concept when chatting with Claude, compared to browsing Wikipedia.
> There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them.
> ...but including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.
Sadly, with my disillusionment with the tech industry, plus the trend of the past 20 years, this smacks of Larry Page's early statements about how bad advertising could distort search results and Google would never do that. Unsurprisingly, I am not able to find the exact quote with Google.
100%. Love this approach by Anthropic. The Meta "monetization league" is assembling at OpenAI and doing what they've done best at Meta.
However, I do think we need to take Anthropic's word with a grain of salt, too. To say they're fully working in the user's interest has yet to be proven. This trust would require a lot of effort to be earned. Once the companies intends to or becomes public, incentives change, investors expect money and throwing your users under the bus is a tried and tested way of increasing shareholder value.
So they have "made a choice" to keep Claude ad-free, they say. "Today [...] Claude’s only incentive is to give a helpful answer", they say. But there's nothing that suggests that they can't make a different choice tomorrow, or whenever it suits them. It's not profitable to betray your trust too early.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadVery diplomatic of them to say "we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions" while also taking a dig at OpenAI on their youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA
It appears they trend in the right direction:
- Have not kissed the Ring.
- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).
- Committing to no ads.
- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]
The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])
It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.
I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?
[1]https://archive.is/Pm2QS
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...
[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...
[4]https://archive.is/4NGBE
There are no good guys, Anthropic is one of the worst of the AI companies. Their CEO is continuously threatening all of the white collar workers, they have engineering playing the 100x engineer game on Xitter. They work with Palantir and support ICE. If anything, chinese companies are ethically better at this point.
Hell, OpenAI was the good guy.
No one who believes this should be in any position of authority in the AI space. Anthropic's marketing BS has basically been taken as fact on this website since they started and it's just so tiring to watch this industry fall for the same nonsense over and over and over again.
Anthropic is younger. That's why they're not doing ads. As soon as they actually reach the spending to (not) reach their AGI goals they will start running ads and begging the taxpayer for even more money.
> The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
Dude, you cannot put these two sentences together. The defense department was either a fluke or a PR stunt. If they partner with Palintir they absolutely do not care that their tech is going to be used for killing and other horrible deeds.
A company with morals (which does not exist BTW) would never partner with Palintir.
I always find the CEO using hype and fear as his marketing strategy. A year ago, he came out and said, "Blood-bath" for white collar jobs. It seems to create some sense of anxiety in the receiving end.
Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns, like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that narrative?
Ads playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2m23nhTg1OW258b3XBi...
I wonder how they can get away without showing Ads when ChatGPT has to be doing it. Will the enterprise business be that profitable that Ads are not required?
Maybe OpenAI is going for something different - democratising access to vast majority of the people. Remember that ChatGPT is what people know about and what people use the free version of. Who's to say that making Ads by doing this but also prodiding more access is the wrong choice?
Also, Claude holds nothing against ChatGPT in search. From my previous experiences, ChatGPT is just way better at deep searches through the internet than Claude.
(Props for them for doing this, don't know how this is long-term sustainable for them though ... especially given they want to IPO and there will be huge revenue/margin pressures)
This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn), they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and went with claude.
This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!) with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects against businesses optimizing for intelligence.
It's great that Anthropic is targeting the businesses of the world. It's a little insincere to than declare "no ads", as if that decision would obviously be the same if the bulk of their (not paying) users.
There are, as far as ads go, perfectly fine opportunities to do them in a limited way for limited things within chatbots. I don't know who they think they are helping by highlighting how to do it poorly.
A lot of people are ok with ad supported free tiers
(Also is it possible to do ads in a privacy respecting way or do people just object to ads across the board?)
You can see the very different response by OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp.... ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.
For Anthropic to be proactive in saying they will not pursue ad based revenue I think is not just "one of the good guys" but that they may be stabilizing on a business model of both seat and usage based subscriptions.
Either way, both companies are hemorrhaging money.
Yeah I remember when Google used to be like this. Then today I tried to go to 39dollarglasses.com and accidentally went to the top search result which was actually an ad for some other company. Arrrg.
I end up using ChatGPT for general coding tasks because of the limited session/weekly limit Claude pro offers, and it works surprisingly well.
The best is IMO to use them both. They complement each other.
But I’m happy with position and will cancel my ChatGPT and push my family towards Claude for most things. This taste effect is what I think pushes apple devices into households. Power users making endorsements.
And I think that excess margin is enough to get past lowered ad revenue opportunity.
https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2019074628191142065
In any case, they draw undue attention to openAI rather than themselves. Not good advertising
Both openAI and Anthropic should start selling compute devices instead. There is nothing stoping open-source LLMs from eating their lunch mid-term
It would seem to be ironic if they put ads in their models to say they won't put ads.
Great by Anthropic, but I put basically no long term trust in statements like this.
> ...but including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.
Sadly, with my disillusionment with the tech industry, plus the trend of the past 20 years, this smacks of Larry Page's early statements about how bad advertising could distort search results and Google would never do that. Unsurprisingly, I am not able to find the exact quote with Google.
However, I do think we need to take Anthropic's word with a grain of salt, too. To say they're fully working in the user's interest has yet to be proven. This trust would require a lot of effort to be earned. Once the companies intends to or becomes public, incentives change, investors expect money and throwing your users under the bus is a tried and tested way of increasing shareholder value.