This is one of those “don’t be evil” like articles that companies remove when the going gets tough but I guess we should be thankful that things are looking rosy enough for Anthropic at the moment that they would release a blog like this.

The point about filtering signal vs. noise in search engines can’t really be stated enough. At this point using a search engine and the conventional internet in general is an exercise in frustration. It’s simply a user hostile place – infinite cookie banners for sites that shouldn’t collect data at all, auto play advertisements, engagement farming, sites generated by AI to shill and produce a word count. You could argue that AI exacerbates this situation but you also have to agree that it is much more pleasant to ask perplexity, ChatGPT or Claude a question than to put yourself through the torture of conventional search. Introducing ads into this would completely deprive the user of a way of navigating the web in a way that actually respects their dignity.

I also agree in the sense that the current crop of AIs do feel like a space to think as opposed to a place where I am being manipulated, controlled or treated like some sheep in flock to be sheared for cash.

I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.

It appears they trend in the right direction:

- Have not kissed the Ring.

- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).

- Committing to no ads.

- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]

The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]

- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])

It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.

I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?

[1]https://archive.is/Pm2QS

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...

[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

[4]https://archive.is/4NGBE

I feel like they are picking a lane. ChatGPT is great for chatbots and the like, but, as was discussed in a prior thread, chatbots aren't the end-all-be-all of AI or LLMs. Claude Code is the workhorse for me and most folks I know for AI assisted development and business automation type tasks. Meanwhile, most folks I know who use ChatGPT are really replacing Google Search. This is where folks are trying to create llm.txt files to become more discoverable by ChatGPT specifically.

You can see the very different response by OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp.... ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.

For Anthropic to be proactive in saying they will not pursue ad based revenue I think is not just "one of the good guys" but that they may be stabilizing on a business model of both seat and usage based subscriptions.

Either way, both companies are hemorrhaging money.

This will be an amusing post to revisit in the internet archives when or if they do introduce ads in the future but dressed up in a different presentation and naming. Ultimately the investors will come calling.

Seems short-sighted to commit to not running ads exactly like OpenAI plans to. You win in the court of public opinion for a few months, then look like a hypocrite when you're inevitably forced to run ads because your investors demand it. Sort of like how safetyism was convenient marketing until it became clear that it was revenue repellant and they quietly walked it away.

The key hurdle for AI to leap is establishing trust with users. No one trusts the big players (for good reason) and it is causing serious anxiety among the investors. It seems Claude acknowledges this and is looking to make trust a critical part of their marketing messaging by saying no ads or product placement. The problem is that serving ads is only one facet of trust. There are trust issues around privacy, intellectual property, transparency, training data, security, accuracy, and simply "being evil" that Claude's marketing doesn't acknowledge or address. Trust, on the scale they need, is going to be very hard for any of them to establish, if not impossible.

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!

> "I'm very interested in the idea of a piece of music being a place to think," Richter explained, adding that he had written Daylight as a response to the 2003 Iraq War. [0]

0. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/796801746/max-richter-tiny-de...

Besides the editorial control -which openai openly flagged to want to remain unbiased- there is a deeper issue with ads-based revenue models in AI: that of margins. If you want ads to cover compute & make margins -looking at roughly $50 ARPU at mature FB/GOOG level- you have two levers: sell more advertisement, or offer dumber models.

This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn), they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and went with claude.

This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!) with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects against businesses optimizing for intelligence.

I always found Anthropic to be trying hard to signal as one of the "good guys".

I wonder how they can get away without showing Ads when ChatGPT has to be doing it. Will the enterprise business be that profitable that Ads are not required?

Maybe OpenAI is going for something different - democratising access to vast majority of the people. Remember that ChatGPT is what people know about and what people use the free version of. Who's to say that making Ads by doing this but also prodiding more access is the wrong choice?

Also, Claude holds nothing against ChatGPT in search. From my previous experiences, ChatGPT is just way better at deep searches through the internet than Claude.

They are not trying to sell adds. They are trying to sell themselves as a monthly service. That is what I think when they are trying to convince me to go there to think. I rather go think at Wikipedia.

They'll shout this message right until the day they change course. Then who will hold them to account?

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

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 do feel like many folks here and elsewhere are missing the mark with LLMs.

1) Yes, they are absolutely useless in a consumer setting. 2) If you want to be a software developer, you absolutely need to know how to understand/interact with one, and you more than likely will need to understand things like https://continue.dev.

I am no longer in software development due to my body slowly (quickly) dying, however I see it all from the sidelines:

1) New tech was rushed to the front lines way too quickly by big tech. 2) Big (and small tech) rushed layoffs way too fast rather than let we devs explore the advantages vs. disadvantages. 3) Companies blame "AI" (LLMs) for layoffs. 4) Most senior devs (including myself) soundly reject AI due to the above. 5) New generation of devs uses AI tools, some struggle occurs where morons don't bother reviewing code that was written by an auto completion engine. 6) We nerds begin to understand the usefulness of LLMs for "the boring part"

Not a shareholder of any company. I'm permanently disabled. Just watching this stuff from the sidelines.

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.

No ads in AI? cheap commitment

Ads are more then obsolete

Using ads in AI, today, is like printing flyers when the Internet started, (or sending email ads 30 years ago: of course Google could have promised: "we will not send spam to your gmail mailbox..." :).

"Ads" aim to influence your behavior: AI is a doing much much more with no need for ads (Claude included)

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.

What makes Anthropic seem like early Apple is not just the unique taste, but the courage to stand firm with their vision of what the product should be.

Not the point of the article, but just responding to the headline: LLMs are a space to think in the same way that watching television is a space to think. Some people may think while watching TV, maybe many of the people reading this watch TV this way, but most will not. In fact, television mostly acts as a soporific, killing intelligent thought and numbing the mind against any sort of complex cognition. Same with LLMs. They're a space to sleepily watch someone else think.

I actually do want ads. Subtle, labeled ads. For many queries in Google, I like to know who is advertising for an intent. In may cases, that is a perfect fit. I don’t want ONLY the companies who have gamed the LLM SEO market to win.

Sure, ad free forever, until it is not.

Great by Anthropic, but I put basically no long term trust in statements like this.

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.

> 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.

Claude have posted on number of very sarcastic videos on twitter that take a jibe at ads https://x.com/claudeai/status/2019071118036942999 with an ending line "Ads are coming to IA. But not to Claude."

Anthropic probably saw how much money they made off of the Moltbot hype and figured that they don’t need ad revenue. They can go a step further and build a marketplace for similar setups, paying the developers who make them in micro transactions per tokens.

Good on Anthropic! I appreciate how deliberate they are on maintaining user trust. Have preferred Claude's responses more through the API, so I don't imagine this would have affected me as much but it is still nice to see.

I like their models. They're powerful. But...

Who do they think believe the whole "don't be evil" in 2026?

We know what's around the corner. Enshitification, loss of trust, frog boiling, account restrictions and upsell, advertising, degradation of service, data sold for advertising and worse.

Y'ain't kidding anyone with this stuff. You're only providing screenshots for future memes.

What other interaction models exist for Claude given that Anthropic seems to be stressing so much that this is for "conversations"?

(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)

I have such mixed feelings about Anthropic. Opus 4.5 is legit, Claude Code has been making solid progress (but it's gonna get stomped by pi) and they've been trying to be more transparent. On the other hand, they still infra issues, they till haven't open sourced Claude Code and they're going after other harnesses that use their sub. Dario also seems to have a very paternalistic attitude that I don't like, though I don't think that will survive the market.

It's nice that they don't show ads in conversations with Claude - but I wonder if they collect profiling information from my prompts and activities to sell to advertising firms.

Don't understand why more companies don't just make ads opt-in as a trade for more features

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?)

i spend most of my time with claude thinking about when my daily usage limit is going to reset

That's true. CI in all of my conversations with AIThat's true. In all my conversations with AI, I think CIaude's thinking is the richest.

Claude focuses on enterprise and B2B rather than mass consumer, so it makes sense for them.

Let's savour this time pre-enshittification of AI. One day we will look back so fondly at it and wonder at our naivety.

That’s positive. How is Claude? Is it censorship heavy?

Claude is the last place where thinking happens.

Important to note Anthropic has next to no consumer usage

Ben Thompson has long been insistent that ChatGPT and other AI tools basically have to have ads and it's been a big mistake they didn't have them sooner. It's an interesting take:

> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.

https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs...

> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).

It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.

RemindMe! 2 years

So apparently they're going to run a Super Bowl ad about ChatGPT having ads (without saying ChatGPT of course)........ Has doing an ad that focuses only on something about your competitor ever been the best play? Talk about yourself.

Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns, like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that narrative?

Ads playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2m23nhTg1OW258b3XBi...

Since when does HN welcome blatant self-advertising posts like this one ?

I really want to applaud Anthropic; I remain cautiously optimistic, but I’m not certain how long they will maintain this posture. I will say that the recent announcement from OpenAI has put me off from ChatGPT — I use Gemini occasionally, because it’s the devil I know. OpenAI has gone back and forth on their positions so many times in a way that feels truly hostile to their users.

Plus, I’m not a huge fan of Sam Altman.

Does the veneer of goodness despite (alleged) cutthroat business practices from Anthropic bother anyone else?

!remind me in two years

/s