How Anthropic Used a Super Bowl Ad to Turn a OpenAI’s Announcement to Its Advantage

Feb 14, 2026 / Super Bowl

Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, launched an ad during the Super Bowl this week that directly attacked the category leading competitor, ChatGPT.

See the ad:

The objective is clear: to shape perceptions that ads coming to ChatGPT will hurt the AI experience, and to position Claude AI as a better and different AI that does not include ads.

Anthropic’s campaign, ‘Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.’, includes three videos with a similar pattern. In each one, a person interacts with an AI that resembles ChatGPT. As the conversation evolves, the person learns new things and becomes more engaged, until the AI suddenly promotes an advertiser’s offer based on the discussion, leaving the person confused and annoyed.

The setting feels a bit like an episode of the series Black Mirror, but with humor and pop culture references - featuring Dr. Dre’s ‘What’s the Difference Between Me and You.

Each ad opens with a dramatic word like Betrayal, Deception,or Violation, expressing how people sometimes feel about intrusive advertising.

With this ad, Anthropic achieved two things. First, it planted seeds of doubt and skepticism in the minds of ChatGPT users, making them aware of ads and the possibility of a worse experience because of them. This now puts OpenAI in a problematic situation, as the company is already facing profitability issues, and adding ads to ChatGPT could help it develop a new revenue stream.

Second, it positioned Claude AI as the better solution, one that holds a strong promise of an ad-free experience.

Claude AI’s Super Bowl spot is a rare example of an ad campaign that achieves two objectives without losing the audience’s attention. They took the air out of CHATGPT ads, and, positioned Claude as a different AI.