Sam Altman (X):
First, the good part about the Anthropic ads: they are funny and I laughed.
But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important policy for ads is that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never display ads the way Anthropic displays them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject it.
I think it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a false ad to critique theoretical false ads that aren’t real, but the Super Bowl ad isn’t where I’d expect it to be.
More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI, and we’re committed to free access because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than the total number of people using Claude in the US, so we have a different problem than them. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we won’t show you ads.)
Anthropic serves rich people with an expensive product. We’re glad they’re doing it, and so are we, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI closer to the billions of people who can’t pay for a subscription.
Perhaps more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—blocking companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write their own rules for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.
In addition to access, we are committed to broad, democratic decision-making. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced artificial intelligence. We care deeply about safe, socially beneficial AGI, and we know that the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.
One authoritarian society won’t get us there on its own, not to mention the other obvious risks. It’s a dark path.
As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders and how anyone can build anything now.
We enjoy watching so many people switch to Codex. 500,000 apps have now been downloaded since Monday’s launch, and we think builders are going to really like what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex will win.
We will continue to work hard to make even more information available to our users at ever lower prices.
This time belongs to the builders, not to the people who want to control them.