The Super Bowl AI ad showdown: Anthropic snarks, OpenAI goes earnest

OpenAI is running a Super Bowl LX ad that encourages people to use its coding agent to build their dream projects.

It does not, however, mention Anthropic or the rival’s not-so-subtle you to ChatGPT in its own Super Bowl ads released earlier this week.

Anthropic’s ads, while not mentioning OpenAI directly, make fun of its plans to run advertisements on the platform.

“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” the tag line reads.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad last week in a lengthy X post.

“First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed,” Altman wrote. “But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest.”

OpenAI’s own one-minute ad, released on Sunday, is more earnest. It shows a man’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge from childhood to adulthood. The ad ends with him using OpenAI’s Codex tool to further his goals.

“Our job was to make a film that feels like the beginning of a builder’s story with the curiosity, the frustration, and the eventual breakthroughs,” Michael Tabtabai, OpenAI’s vice president of Global Creative, said in a statement.

“We drew from the influences that shaped our own researchers and engineers, then paired that with real stories from across the country of people using ChatGPT to build in everyday life,” he said. “If someone watching thinks, ‘I wonder if I can do that,’ we’ve done our job.”