They made an ad to say that they won't have ads, i dont know if they are aware of the irony.

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

Sometimes posts like this are just value-signaling. I hear a lot of cynicism and "just you wait, the other shoe will drop" comments along those lines.

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!

100%. Love this approach by Anthropic. The Meta "monetization league" is assembling at OpenAI and doing what they've done best at Meta.

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.

I think this says a lot about the business approach of Anthopic compared to OpenAI. Just the vast amount of free messages you get from OpenAI is crazy that turning a profit with that seems impossible. Anthropic is growing more slowly but it seems like they are not running a crazy deficit. They do not need to put ads or porn in their chatbot

> Anthropic is focused on businesses, developers, and helping our users flourish. Our business model is straightforward: we generate revenue through enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions, and we reinvest that revenue into improving Claude for our users. This is a choice with tradeoffs, and we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions.

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

I asked for this last week in an hn comment and people were pretty negative about it in the replies.

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.

I appreciate taking a stance, even if nobody is asking. It would be great if it was less of a bad faith effort.

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.

> There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them.

> ...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.

>An advertising-based business model would introduce incentives that could work against this principle.

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.

So they have "made a choice" to keep Claude ad-free, they say. "Today [...] Claude’s only incentive is to give a helpful answer", they say. But there's nothing that suggests that they can't make a different choice tomorrow, or whenever it suits them. It's not profitable to betray your trust too early.