The Super Bowl, America’s biggest television event, often provides a window into the state of the world’s largest economy. In 2026, the biggest talking point was AI.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude — which upended global markets last week — ran ads satirising its chief rival, OpenAI, for putting ads in ChatGPT, imagining a world where chatbots pivot mid-conversation into pitches for cougar-dating sites and height-boosting insoles. The tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
Last week, when the ads were published in advance of today’s game, OpenAI chief Sam Altman fired back, admitting the ads were “funny” (agreed!) but “clearly dishonest” before accusing Anthropic of serving “an expensive product to rich people” and labelling the company “authoritarian” for wanting to “control what people do with AI”.
OpenAI ran its own, more earnest ad during today’s Super Bowl telecast, encouraging people to build things using AI.
