The days of ChatGPT being an ad-free experience are coming to an end. OpenAI is starting to roll out advertisements to free ChatGPT accounts, and people on the cheaper Go subscription plan will also see them.
OpenAI announced in a blog post, “Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers.” They will not be visible for people on ChatGPT’s Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers.
This was a long time coming. The AI datacenters that power ChatGPT, Sora, and other services from OpenAI are not cheap, and even if the venture capital money isn’t running out anytime soon, OpenAI’s goal is to eventually cover operational costs and make a profit. The company already has enterprise plans for teams and large companies, paid subscriptions for power users, and billing for API usage, but ads are another easy way to generate revenue.
The advertisements aren’t just banners that appear between text messages. One example had someone asking for “ideas for my work potluck,” and ChatGPT responding with a list of suggestions, followed by an advertisement for food delivery. The ad is in a separate box and labelled ‘Sponsored’—at least for now, ChatGPT won’t be injecting subtle product placements into normal responses.
The blog post also said, “Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. Advertisers only receive aggregate information about how their ads perform such as number of views or clicks.”
OpenAI’s advertising income is not going to the creators and publishers that it scraped to achieve $100 billion in funding and hundreds of millions of users. The company has deals with a limited number of publishers, like Axios and Future, but all other content is fair game for AI model training with no payment.
Several companies have also shared how they are using ChatGPT’s advertisements. Adobe, everyone’s favorite tech company with no recent controversies, said it will run ads for Acrobat Studio and Firefly as the initial pilot test. Target, which already had a ChatGPT integration, will show ads on questions like “What are some countertop cooking appliances that make everyday meals more convenient?”
Anthropic, which develops the Claude AI assistant, has promised to “remain ad-free” and even ran a Super Bowl ad to publicize the decision. After the ad aired, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter/X that Anthropic used “a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real,” and called the company “authoritarian.”
There will probably be advertisements on all free AI apps and services at some point, but at least for now, ChatGPT is the only big name rolling them out. Previous versions of Microsoft Copilot did have advertisements—back when the service was known as Bing Chat—but current versions don’t seem to have them.
