OpenAI is implementing ads in ChapGPT, a controversial measure that has started for its users in the United States, but will end up reaching its 800 million users. The AI giant’s argument is well known: «it is necessary to compensate the enormous infrastructure costs».
The arrival of advertising to the chatbot that started the current revolution in generative AI was announced. Despite previous assertions by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (“I hate ads, simply because they are an aesthetic option”) the multimillion-dollar investments planned for the creation of AI data centers that support their services in an excessive hoarding of semiconductors that threatens to cause a reversal of the customer market, together with corporate pressure in the face of the imminent IPO and the need to get out of the red in the income statement, are behind this change of course.
OpenAI is confident of generating a significant revenue stream as ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly active users. However, it has risks: advertising can bother a good part of them, Affect your confidence and limit your growth. There is no shortage of alternatives, even for some better ones like Google’s Gemini, and others like Microsoft’s Copilot or Anthropic’s Claude.
To understand the importance of the change in strategy, say that one of its major competitors, Anthropic, published ads during the 2026 SuperBowl to criticize OpenAI’s advertising. The company ruled out ads on Claude, explaining that it will focus on developing smaller models and could introduce cheaper subscription plans if users demand them.
Announcements on ChatGPT
OpenAI explains that this “initial advertising experiment” It’s part of its effort to support broader access to increasingly powerful AI features while helping fund the infrastructure and development that keeps the assistant running at scale.
To reduce criticism of the measure, the company announces a series of ‘advertising principles’ where it promises not to sell user data to advertisers. Ads will be clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the chatbot’s responses. Additionally, ads will not influence the assistant’s responses or compromise privacy.
Users will have some control over the ad experience, including personalization options, as well as disabling ads in sensitive contexts such as discussions about health or politics.
Deployment
The company emphasizes that this initial phase is a test and learn opportunity. Feedback from early users will help shape how ads are refined and potentially expanded in the future. OpenAI states that it will use the information from this testing process to “better balance monetization with user experience”.
ChatGPT ads will be included in the free version (Free) and also in the new economical subscription model ChatGPT Go which the company premiered in India and has already begun to deploy in the rest of the markets. This plan is priced at $8 per month (the cheapest of OpenAI’s paid solutions) and offers benefits in the number of interactions, access to the latest GPT-5.2 model, and expanded memory. The rest of OpenAI’s subscription plans, ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise, will not have advertising, at least for now.
