The point about filtering signal vs. noise in search engines can’t really be stated enough. At this point using a search engine and the conventional internet in general is an exercise in frustration. It’s simply a user hostile place – infinite cookie banners for sites that shouldn’t collect data at all, auto play advertisements, engagement farming, sites generated by AI to shill and produce a word count. You could argue that AI exacerbates this situation but you also have to agree that it is much more pleasant to ask perplexity, ChatGPT or Claude a question than to put yourself through the torture of conventional search. Introducing ads into this would completely deprive the user of a way of navigating the web in a way that actually respects their dignity.

I also agree in the sense that the current crop of AIs do feel like a space to think as opposed to a place where I am being manipulated, controlled or treated like some sheep in flock to be sheared for cash.

You can see the very different response by OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp.... ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.

For Anthropic to be proactive in saying they will not pursue ad based revenue I think is not just "one of the good guys" but that they may be stabilizing on a business model of both seat and usage based subscriptions.

Either way, both companies are hemorrhaging money.

It appears they trend in the right direction:

- Have not kissed the Ring.

- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).

- Committing to no ads.

- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]

The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]

- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])

It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.

I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?

[1]https://archive.is/Pm2QS

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...

[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

[4]https://archive.is/4NGBE

This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn), they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and went with claude.

This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!) with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects against businesses optimizing for intelligence.

I wonder how they can get away without showing Ads when ChatGPT has to be doing it. Will the enterprise business be that profitable that Ads are not required?

Maybe OpenAI is going for something different - democratising access to vast majority of the people. Remember that ChatGPT is what people know about and what people use the free version of. Who's to say that making Ads by doing this but also prodiding more access is the wrong choice?

Also, Claude holds nothing against ChatGPT in search. From my previous experiences, ChatGPT is just way better at deep searches through the internet than Claude.

https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2019074628191142065

In any case, they draw undue attention to openAI rather than themselves. Not good advertising

Both openAI and Anthropic should start selling compute devices instead. There is nothing stoping open-source LLMs from eating their lunch mid-term

But combined with the other projects Anthropic has pursued (e.g. around understanding bias and explaining "how the model is thinking as it is") and decisions it has made, I'm happy with the course they're plotting. They seem consistently upstanding, thoughtful, and respectful. I want to commend them and earnestly say: Keep up the good work!

However, I do think we need to take Anthropic's word with a grain of salt, too. To say they're fully working in the user's interest has yet to be proven. This trust would require a lot of effort to be earned. Once the companies intends to or becomes public, incentives change, investors expect money and throwing your users under the bus is a tried and tested way of increasing shareholder value.

Very diplomatic of them to say "we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions" while also taking a dig at OpenAI on their youtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA

But I’m happy with position and will cancel my ChatGPT and push my family towards Claude for most things. This taste effect is what I think pushes apple devices into households. Power users making endorsements.

And I think that excess margin is enough to get past lowered ad revenue opportunity.

It's great that Anthropic is targeting the businesses of the world. It's a little insincere to than declare "no ads", as if that decision would obviously be the same if the bulk of their (not paying) users.

There are, as far as ads go, perfectly fine opportunities to do them in a limited way for limited things within chatbots. I don't know who they think they are helping by highlighting how to do it poorly.

> ...but including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.

Sadly, with my disillusionment with the tech industry, plus the trend of the past 20 years, this smacks of Larry Page's early statements about how bad advertising could distort search results and Google would never do that. Unsurprisingly, I am not able to find the exact quote with Google.

I agree with this - I'm not so much worried that ChatGPT is going to silently insert advertising copy into model answers. I'm worried that advertising alongside answers creates bad incentives that then drive future model development. We saw Google Search go down this path.

Great by Anthropic, but I put basically no long term trust in statements like this.

(Props for them for doing this, don't know how this is long-term sustainable for them though ... especially given they want to IPO and there will be huge revenue/margin pressures)

A lot of people are ok with ad supported free tiers

(Also is it possible to do ads in a privacy respecting way or do people just object to ads across the board?)

Plus, I’m not a huge fan of Sam Altman.

Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns, like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that narrative?

Ads playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2m23nhTg1OW258b3XBi...