Sam Altman counters Anthropic's ads by reframing the debate. He positions OpenAI as a champion for broad, free access for the masses ("billions of people who can't pay"), while painting Anthropic as an elitist service for the wealthy ("serves an expensive product to rich people"), shifting the narrative from ad ethics to accessibility.

When you're the market leader, the strongest response to a competitor's jab is indifference, like Don Draper's "I don't think about you at all." OpenAI's lengthy, serious rebuttal to Anthropic's ad amplified the attack and made them look defensive, which is the opposite of how a dominant player should behave.

By dropping critical ads just before the Super Bowl and OpenAI's planned ad launch, Anthropic made it impossible for OpenAI to craft and run a response ad in time. This maximized the unchallenged impact of their campaign by muddying the waters at a critical moment.

A smaller competitor can attack the market leader without naming them. Everyone assumes the criticism targets the dominant player, allowing the challenger to land hits on the category as a whole, which disproportionately harms the leader. This is a powerful metaphor for challenger marketing.

Unlike previous technologies like the internet or smartphones, which enjoyed years of positive perception before scrutiny, the AI industry immediately faced a PR crisis of its own making. Leaders' early and persistent "AI will kill everyone" narratives, often to attract capital, have framed the public conversation around fear from day one.

Dario Amadei's public criticism of advertising and "social media entrepreneurs" isn't just personal ideology. It's a strategic narrative to position Anthropic as the principled, enterprise-focused AI choice, contrasting with consumer-focused rivals like Google and OpenAI who need to "maximize engagement for a billion users."

The conflict between AI labs has moved beyond a 'cold war' of poaching talent to a public battle for perception. Anthropic’s ads represent a 'gloves off' moment, using what the hosts call 'fear-mongering' and 'propaganda' to directly attack a competitor's business model on a massive stage like the Super Bowl.

Anthropic's ads lack a call-to-action, indicating their primary goal isn't consumer downloads. Instead, they use fear-mongering to "muddy the water" around OpenAI's upcoming ad product, aiming to make enterprise decision-makers and regulators wary of ad-supported AI models before they launch.

By attacking the concept of ads in LLMs, Anthropic may not just hurt OpenAI but also erode general consumer trust in all AI chatbots. This high-risk strategy could backfire if the public becomes skeptical of the entire category, including Anthropic's own products, especially if they ever decide to introduce advertising.