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.

> ...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.

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.

(Props for them for doing this, don't know how this is long-term sustainable for them though ... especially given they want to IPO and there will be huge revenue/margin pressures)

A lot of people are ok with ad supported free tiers

(Also is it possible to do ads in a privacy respecting way or do people just object to ads across the board?)