First, the good part about the Anthropic commercials: They’re funny, and I laughed.
But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so obviously dishonest. Our most important principle for advertising says that we will absolutely not do this; We obviously would never run ads the way Anthropic portrays them. We are not stupid and we know our users will reject it.
I think it’s on brand for anthropic doublespeak to use a misleading ad to criticize theoretically misleading ads that aren’t real, but the Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it to be.
More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and we are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than the total number of people using the cloud in the US, so we have a problem of a different size than them. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we won’t show you ads.)
Anthropic serves expensive products to rich people. We’re glad they do and so are we, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to the billions of people who can’t pay for a subscription.
Perhaps even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI – they block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including ours), they want to write their own rules about what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they even want to tell other companies what their business models can be.
We are committed to broad, democratic decision-making, including access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care deeply about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.
A totalitarian company won’t get us there on its own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. This is a dark path.
As for our Super Bowl ad: It’s about builders, and how anyone can build anything now.
We’re enjoying seeing so many people switching to Codecs. The app has already seen over 500,000 downloads since its launch on Monday, and we think builders will really love what’s coming over the next few weeks. I believe Codex will win.
We will continue to work hard to provide our users with even more information at lower prices.
This is the time of the builders, not of those who want to occupy them.
