Anthropic keeps Claude ad-free as rivals test advertising in chatbots

Anthropic continues to promise that Claude will remain ad-free, while OpenAI has more than 100,000 customers advertising on ChatGPT since ads debuted there in February. Google has also expanded ads in AI Mode to 10 more countries beyond the US and said users find them highly relevant; advertisers, however, remain dissatisfied with the experience, according to Wired.

Wired describes Koah Labs, which brings ads to more than 200 AI apps, as an example of the industry’s challenges. CEO Nic Baird says ads partly created by AI generate twice as many clicks, while the network gets a click-through rate of about 3% by using the context of the entire conversation to select ads. The approach may improve relevance, but it also raises privacy questions because the company receives the user’s conversation up to that point.