Super Bowl 60 is this weekend, and the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks aren’t the only ones battling for the title.
Generative AI startups and arch rivals OpenAI and Anthropic are using the major US sporting event to release ads and promote products, as both model makers attempt to win over consumers and enterprises. However, while Anthropic’s ads are entertaining, the winner of the AI race will not be the seller who places the most targeted ads, but the one who offers the best price. However, OpenAI is expected to release a 60-second advertisement on February 8. Super Bowl Sunday, Anthropic previewed four different Super Bowl ads this week (OpenAI has not previewed its own ads).
The basis of all anthropological sites is the same. A human character sharing or asking a question to a chatbot-like character. The chatbot starts answering the question, then moves on to promoting a product or advertisement. Each ad ends with the same tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to the cloud.”
That cloud advertising tagline is a direct aim at its competitor, a humorously pointed response to the ChatGate maker’s announcement on January 16 that it would begin testing ads in the free version of its globally popular AI chatbot, after previously saying the move would be a “last resort” in 2024.
Anthropic’s ad is the latest attack in the intensifying AI battle between the two frontier model makers, highlighting an increasingly tense push-pull in their battle to become the preferred premium AI provider for enterprises and consumers.
While OpenAI has been the leader in the consumer market with 800 million to 900 million active ChatGate users every week, Anthropic has built a reputation as the gold standard in enterprise, and has momentum. Founded by former OpenAI executives and researchers, the vendor has established itself as a responsible AI model maker with its constitutive AI framework and model reference protocol Generative AI standard, making it a preferred choice in enterprises over OpenAI. at least for now. Google, which competes with independent generative AI vendors, has seen notable progress with its Gemini model family for both businesses and consumers.
two different customers
“We’re talking about consumer versus enterprise,” said David Nicholson, analyst at Futurum Group.
But both vendors are also trying to establish their hold in markets where the other vendor is dominant. Anthropic is trying to carve out a role in the consumer sector, while OpenAI is trying to show it is enterprise-ready with a full range of models for commercial use.
“They’re going after each other for areas they’re trying to get into, and Anthropic is saying, ‘We’re all enterprises, we’re not going to sell your data for ads,'” said Ray “R” Wang, CEO and founder of Constellation Research.
In response to Anthropic’s ads, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that although the ads are “funny”, they are also “dishonest”.
“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” Altman wrote. “We’re doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to the billions of people who can’t pay for a subscription.”
Altman said that more Texans use ChatGPT for free than the cloud in the US, a claim that is probably completely unproven.
This battle has seen almost daily skirmishes leading up to the Super Bowl, which has served as a stage for some of the most brilliant and ingenious commercials from major companies for decades.
OpenAI also released its Frontier model on February 5, which competes directly with Anthropic’s Cloud Cowork AI agent. That product release sparked a Panic market selling Stocks in legal information providers soared earlier this week, when Anthropic launched a series of plugins for vertical industries, including legal, that sparked fear among traditional software suppliers in some sectors. Meanwhile, the Frontier platform helps enterprises create, deploy, and manage AI agents to act as AI co-workers. A few hours later on February 5, Anthropic introduced Opus 4.6, an upgrade to its popular Advanced Reasoning model. The model supports a massive million-token context window, enabling it to process codebases and large legal and financial documents.
The Duel release, particularly Anthropic’s Cowork, sparked an intense debate in the tech world about the rapid intrusion of generic AI models, particularly Anthropic’s, into applications long dominated by software companies, with many declaring the “death of SaaS” at the hands of big language and other AI models.
Meanwhile, the standoff counter-attacks between Anthropic and OpenAI show that the consumer and enterprise AI markets are, in some ways, intertwined.
“What’s happening in the enterprise is what we call the consumerization of IT,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner. “‘I’m using this tool in my personal life. It’s phenomenally helpful. And you know what? I want to use it in my workplace.'”
Chandrasekaran said that because of this, even though Anthropic has had success in the enterprise market, it cannot ignore the consumer market.
A push for enterprise
On the other hand, while OpenAI is a leader in AI technology, the vendor appears unable to generate sufficient revenue, at least in the short term, without success in selling to enterprise customers. Over the past few months, the vendor has partnered with SaaS providers like ServiceNow and cloud data platform vendor SnowflakeThis shows that this enterprise is making its position in the market. Anthropic also rolled out one Partnership with ServiceNowLarge IT self-service vendor.
OpenAI’s release of a platform like Frontier is also an attempt to prove that it is enterprise-ready.
“It’s on the ground to say, ‘Hey, we want to be hyper-focused on the enterprise,'” Chandrasekaran said, adding that the vendor is moving away from focusing on future technologies such as superintelligence to more near-term projects. “They definitely want to focus more on enterprise because they believe both Google and Anthropic have really amazing growth in 2025 in terms of enterprise traction.”
However, proving enterprise-ready isn’t as simple as releasing a product, Wang said. He said that while OpenAI is working to prove itself by hiring key executive talent like Dennis Dresser, the former Slack CEO of Salesforce, the model maker still has a long way to go.
“Culturally, they are not ready,” Wang said. He said that for a vendor to be enterprise ready, it must have a clear, consistent roadmap that enterprises can feel comfortable with. It should have customer service and on-site engineers who can help buyers succeed.
“You have to make sure that these enterprise activities are consistent because a CIO and a CEO’s job is on the line, depending on your technology,” Wang said.
In comparison to OpenAI, Anthropic and its chief commercial officer, Paul Smith, already have a plan to help enterprises succeed, Wang said.
“On the other hand, OpenAI is just getting started,” he said. “They’ll get there, but it doesn’t look like they’re ready to venture out yet.”
just one ad
Anthropic, on the other hand, won’t win the contest with its Super Bowl ad.
“The really important steps forward from an OpenAI and Anthropic perspective won’t be on a television screen during the Super Bowl,” Nicholson said. “They will be in Zoom meetings and face-to-face meetings between the sales organizations and partners of those two companies, through which their capabilities will be delivered to enterprise customers.”
He said it’s unlikely a CIO or CTO would be impressed by a Super Bowl ad, even though more than 100 million couples have trained on it.
“They will be impressed by how effectively their existing SaaS providers are able to leverage these capabilities,” Nicholson said. “No one cares whether it’s OpenAI or Anthropic, if what’s being delivered is an intelligent, authentic capability within my business and reasoning over my private data.”
go public and have a big race
Still, Anthropic’s Super Bowl strategy will likely help shape public perception as sellers race toward an IPO. The same applies for OpenAI with its own advertising and IPO aspirations.
“Whoever goes public first sets the direction in terms of valuation, so they’re all racing to get out before the fourth quarter,” Wang said.
However, as both vendors fight in the enterprise and consumer arena, a major competition is looming.
“Both Anthropic and OpenAI are now competing google gemini For enterprises,” Wang said.
And the high-stakes competition goes beyond Google, Chandrasekaran said. The two powerful independent candidates are competing against hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft, as well as SaaS companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday, and platform vendors like Microsoft, Inc. databricks and Snowflake, with an enterprise focus in agentic AI and as the top enterprise choice.
“This is an extended battle in some ways,” Chandrasekaran said. “It really wants to be that layer for building continuous workflows in the future. All these companies are trying to put a stake in the ground to say they are the platform that customers should be paying attention to.”
