The tech age cola war
A modern ad war unfolds as Anthropic and OpenAI turn Super Bowl screens into a battleground over ads, trust, and the future of AI conversations
By Naini Thaker
Last Updated: Feb 12, 2026, 14:39 IST2 min
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Over the years, we’ve witnessed some unforgettable advertising feuds—BMW vs Audi trading billboard jabs across highways, Pepsi vs Coca-Cola waging decades of taste-test wars, Samsung vs Apple sparring over innovation, and Burger King vs McDonald’s battling it out with flame-grilled sass. These were cultural moments as much as marketing ones, fought through hoardings, TV spots, print ads, and clever one-liners designed to claim superiority in the public imagination.
Today, in the age of artificial intelligence, a new version of this cola war has emerged—one waged not over sugary drinks or smartphones but over ideology, user trust, and the future of how we interact with machines. This time, the rivals aren’t consumer brands but AI giants: Anthropic vs OpenAI.
OpenAI has begun testing ads inside ChatGPT for free-tier and lower-cost users in the US. But it framed the strategy as a democratising move: A way to keep ChatGPT free for hundreds of millions of people.
The company emphasised safeguards—ads would be “clearly labelled,” appear only at the bottom of answers, avoid sensitive topics like health or politics, and never influence the model’s responses.
Just days later, Anthropic launched a multi-million-dollar Super Bowl campaign declaring, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Its four ads—titled “Deception,” “Betrayal,” “Violation,” and “Treachery”—dramatise scenarios in which an AI assistant suddenly slips into jarring product placement mid-conversation.
While the ads don’t mention OpenAI, they were a clear dig at the platform for launching ads.
As a response to this ad, Sam Altman posted on X, acknowledging that the Anthropic ads “are funny, and I laughed.” But he called the ads “clearly dishonest”, clarifying that the “most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that.”
He continued to take a dig at Anthropic, saying that everyone deserves to use AI and that OpenAI is committed to free access. He wrote: “Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.” Further adding, “More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do.”
Altman went all out with his critique, writing statements such as “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product [including us]…”
OpenAI states that it is committed to broad, democratic decision-making in addition to access. The company’s executives also pushed back on misinformation that went viral in the lead-up to the Super Bowl, including fabricated stories implying last-minute changes to their own ad. The trolling became so intense that OpenAI leaders publicly labelled some viral posts as “fake news.”
However, Anthropic continues to maintain that it will remain ad-free.
As both companies escalate their messaging—and as AI increasingly mediates how we think, search, plan, and confide—the stakes are only getting higher. The 2026 Super Bowl ad was just the opening strike.
First Published: Feb 12, 2026, 14:52
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