Clash in Super Bowl ads between OpenAI and Anthropic signals entry into AI’s trash talk era, with race to own AI agents heating up

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Yesterday’s Super Bowl wasn’t just about a Seattle Seahawks victory, a halftime show by Bad Bunny, and beer ads. This year’s football spectacle vividly showed how the long-standing AI rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic has escalated into a noisier battle over perception, positioning, and influence.

Anthropic for the first time spent millions on several satirical Super Bowl ads. The ads had headlines like ‘Deception’, ‘Betrayal’, ‘Treachery’, and ‘Violation’, with the tagline ‘Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude’. Though not naming OpenAI, these ads clearly targeted OpenAI’s plan to insert ads in ChatGPT, noting Anthropic’s commitment to keeping Claude ad-free. OpenAI’s leadership pushed back, defending their strategy and airing their own more serious Super Bowl ad featuring the Codex tool, focusing on ‘builders’—promoting that anyone can build with AI.

The social media buzz about the ads became so intense before the game that the feud spilled into trolling and misinformation. Fake headlines on X claimed last-minute changes to OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad, prompting OpenAI president Greg Brockman to post ‘fake news’ on Reddit and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch to post on X about a supposed Ad Age story saying OpenAI altered its ad at the last minute as a ‘fake headline and entire fake website’ (which it was). The Ad Age reporter allegedly involved also said she didn’t write the article. Meanwhile, tech show TBPN launched its own fake ‘news’ with a parody website called Claude with Ads.

A broader fight beyond models

What had for years, at least publicly, been a relatively muted battle between the two companies over raw model performance—again seen in last week’s rival releases of Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex—has now expanded into a wider fight over brand, trust, safety narratives, and ultimately who gets to shape the next generation of intelligent AI agents.

Before the Super Bowl, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded unusually directly to Anthropic’s campaign, calling the ads ‘funny’ but ‘clearly dishonest’. In a long post on X, Altman said ‘Anthropic serves an expensive product to wealthy people. We’re glad they do that, and we’re doing the same, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions who can’t afford subscriptions.’

Anthropic, for the most part, let its marketing and public statements speak. Anthropic president Daniela Amodei insisted the ad wasn’t about OpenAI or ‘any other company but us’. Anthropic had previously targeted OpenAI indirectly. In May 2025, they put up billboards in San Francisco saying ‘AI you can trust’ and ‘The one without all the drama’, which many saw as an indirect reference to the failed 2023 board coup against Altman at OpenAI and subsequent staff changes. CEO Dario Amodei recently took a swipe at rivals’ ‘code red’ moments without naming Google or OpenAI—both companies that declared official ‘code reds’ to counter competitive pressure from other AI firms. The billboards aimed to position Anthropic as calmer and more thoughtful than its competitors.

In a statement alongside the Super Bowl campaign, Anthropic said it made a ‘principled decision’ not to display sponsored links or ads in its Claude chatbot. ‘People’s conversations with LLMs are often very personal,’ the company wrote. ‘Using such intimate details to serve ads didn’t feel like a respectful way to handle users’ information.’

Public jabs continued as the game played out. Daniel Steigman, an OpenAI Codex staffer, wrote on X: ‘I much prefer OpenAI’s positive AI outlook over Anthropic’s negative one in the Super Bowl ads. It’s like we believe in the brighter future we’re building.’ OpenAI president Greg Brockman reposted Steigman’s post, adding ‘a fundamental difference in our respective outlooks on AI’.

A tonal shift

The unusually public back-and-forth signals a shift in tone for both companies. Historically, OpenAI avoided directly naming Anthropic, while Anthropic mostly kept public comments focused on its own principles rather than criticizing rivals’ alleged flaws. Still, the rivalry between two of the most well-funded startups in history is deep-seated. Anthropic was founded in 2020 by Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela, and other former OpenAI employees who parted ways over disagreements about safety, commercialization, and Altman’s leadership style. But a rivalry once centered on research direction and model capabilities is now playing out through competing narratives about trust, safety, and how AI should be used in everyday work and decision-making. The scale of the OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry is highlighted by how different and large the two companies have become. OpenAI is valued at around $500 billion, with over 800 million global users, but remains far from profitability as it spends heavily on infrastructure, computing, and consumer products. Anthropic, which is raising funds at a reported $350 billion valuation, has fewer users but has established a strong enterprise presence and has told investors it expects to break even by 2028—sooner than OpenAI—despite still burning billions annually. It’s unlikely the current flare-up over Super Bowl ads will be the only clash between the two companies. While they were squabbling over the ads last week, both were launching competing products. Both Anthropic and OpenAI released new flagship models—Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex—while OpenAI introduced Frontier, an AI agent platform expected to compete with Claude and Cowork’s agentic workflows. The stakes are huge. So it’s no surprise that as competition shifts from models to agents, from benchmarks to real-world market share, and from technical stats to user perception, the OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry is set to intensify.