OpenAI is about to smear advertising across ChatGPT and pretend it is a clever growth hack.
The US$500bn start-up says it is introducing ads on ChatGPT as it hunts fresh revenue to fund expansion and hold off rivals Google and Anthropic.
The San Francisco-headquartered outfit said it will start testing adverts on its free chatbot and its cheapest paid tier.
Ads will show up at the bottom of ChatGPT answers in the coming weeks, with OpenAI insisting they will be clearly labelled and only appear when relevant.
This is the classic inshitification arc, taking a product people tolerate because it is useful and stuffing it with marketing until the trust evaporates.
OpenAI, chief executive Sam Altman’s shop, is looking for new income streams to bankroll spending commitments of roughly US$1.4tn on computing over the next decade.
It reckons it will make “low billions” of dollars from advertising in 2026, then more each year after.
The FT previously reported that OpenAI was exploring advertising in late December 2024, but it delayed the plan after an internal “code red” to focus on Google and Anthropic.
Advertising turned Google and Meta into money machines, but OpenAI had resisted the idea of baking ads into chatbot answers because it can corrode objectivity and make users second-guess everything.
OpenAI said: “People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place. That means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising.”
In recent months, OpenAI has been boosting ChatGPT’s ability to store “memories”, hoovering up context that can later be retrieved for more personalised replies.
That same memory pile is a tidy stash of preferences for hyper-personalised advertising, even if OpenAI says personalisation can be turned off and memories deleted.
Google has already pushed personalised ads into its AI mode in search, serving bespoke discounts to shoppers on its platform.
OpenAI is chasing other lines too, including AI hardware devices, bespoke products for governments and businesses and new shopping tools.
