- OpenAI is officially preparing to test ads in ChatGPT.
- The move comes as the AI company looks to increase revenue amid $1.4 trillion in spending commitments in the coming years.
- CEO Sam Altman once portrayed ads as "a last resort" business model for the company.
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."
A lot has changed for OpenAI in even that brief window, and the company's embrace of advertising is a testament to just how expensive the AI race has become.
Altman, former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo (who OpenAI hired as its CEO of applications in early 2025), and seemingly every member of the company's C-suite have expressed an almost insatiable demand for more compute in interviews in the last year.
OpenAI now has roughly $1.4 trillion in spending commitments on data centers and related infrastructure, drawing 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
OpenAI said this is an example of what ads could look like in ChatGPT.
OpenAI
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 would 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."
This is a developing story…
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