Netflix famously backtracked on its stance toward ads. Now, OpenAI is following suit.
The AI pioneer announced that ads are coming to ChatGPT — less than two years after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman portrayed them as “a last resort.”
“Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” Altman said during an event at Harvard University in May 2024. “I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model.”
Altman’s softened stance since then underlines the massive change OpenAI has undergone in the last two years, and the company’s embrace of advertising is a testament to just how expensive the AI race has become.
In June, the OpenAI CEO said he wasn’t “totally against” ads, he just wanted to make sure OpenAI got the balance correct.
“We haven’t done any advertising product yet. I kind of…I mean, I’m not totally against it,” Altman said on OpenAI’s podcast. “I can point to areas where I like ads. I think ads on Instagram, kinda cool. I bought a bunch of stuff from them. But I am, like, I think it’d be very hard to — I mean, take a lot of care to get right.”
In October, Altman expressed a desire to make sure the company went about ads in the proper manner when asked about OpenAI’s past criticisms that other tech companies made addictive products.
“We’re definitely worried about this,” Altman said in response to a question that expressed concern about the similarities of Sora, OpenAI’s AI video app, and TikTok and the potential of ads. “I worry about it, not just for things like Sora and TikTok and ads in ChatGPT, which are maybe known problems that we can design carefully.”
Meanwhile, Altman, former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo (who OpenAI hired as its CEO of applications in early 2025), and seemingly every other member of the company’s C-suite have expressed an almost insatiable demand for more compute in interviews.
It’s proven a costly endeavor. OpenAI now has roughly $1.4 trillion in spending commitments on data centers and related infrastructure, raising questions about how it plans to pay the bills without the benefit of the advertising businesses of its Big Tech competitors, like Google and Meta.
OpenAI also completed its restructuring into a more traditional for-profit, a move Altman said was designed to make it easier to attract future investments.
How the ads will work
As part of the announcement, OpenAI said that free and Go users of the popular AI chatbot would start seeing ads being tested “in the coming weeks.”
Sharing details on the planned test, OpenAI said that ChatGPT’s results “will not be influenced by ads,” the ads will be clearly labeled, and chatbot conversations will remain private and not shared with advertisers.
Paid users of OpenAI’s Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans won’t see the ads, the company said.
Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, who has previously spoken about her desire to get the ads balance correctly, wrote on X that the most important factor was “ads will not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.”
While Instacart launched ads during Simo’s time leading the company, she has said OpenAI’s approach would look different.
In November, Simo told Wired that the company would be “extremely respectful” of the deep well of user data OpenAI has when it came to launching ads.
“If we ever were to do anything, it would have to be a very different model than what has been done before,” she said. “What I’ve learned from building ad platforms is that the thing people don’t like about ads very often is not the ads themselves, it’s the use of the data behind the ads.”
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