OpenAI is building a team to make sure bad ads don’t mess up its highly anticipated introduction of advertising in ChatGPT.
An OpenAI job listing for a software engineer posted late January revealed the company is building an “ads integrity” team.
The ad describes the job as a high-impact role on “a 0 → 1 team,” a commonly used term in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to describe a team being built from scratch.
This person will be responsible for designing systems that enable OpenAI’s ad business to grow without compromising user trust and safety, per the listing.
It’s common for Big Tech companies with large ad businesses to create teams to combat ad fraud and address other issues, such as brand safety. OpenAI, which confirmed last month that it would soon begin testing ChatGPT ads, is building this part of its ad function early.
The job listing also says that its new ad integrity hire will work on developing “know your customer” (KYC) systems to verify advertisers’ identities and assess their risk. KYC, a term most commonly used in the finance industry, is an important but labor-intensive discipline for cracking down on scam ads and other harmful content created by criminals and other bad actors. It’s a particularly pressing issue for Big Tech companies with self-service ad platforms, as a recent Reuters investigation into Meta highlighted. Meta said in early December it had removed “more than 134 million scam ads” in 2025.
Ariella Garcia, chief operating officer of the Check My Ads Institute, said it would be interesting to see how substantive OpenAI’s investment in its ads integrity team would be beyond the initial launch.
“KYC on advertisers is certainly a good foundation, but the materiality of the risk of a large volume of scam ads in the early days is far lower,” Garcia said.
The job listing says that the new ads integrity hire will play a role in determining where and how ads are shown in ChatGPT. OpenAI will need to keep user trust in its organic answers as it ramps up its advertising business. At the same time, advertisers have said that OpenAI will need to prove that ads within AI answers can drive results for their businesses if it has any hope of scaling.
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the company will run a small test of ads on ChatGPT’s free version and its Go tier in the US, which users should begin seeing in the coming weeks.
The spokesperson said OpenAI is asking for a minimum spend of $200,000 on ChatGPT ads to participate in the program, confirming prior Adweek reporting. OpenAI will track clicks and impressions, but will likely explore further measurement options as its advertising experiments progress, the spokesperson said.
OpenAI declined to comment on the ads integrity job ad.
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