OpenAI has started to show ads, including to those paying $8/month

Users of the paid OpenAI Go plan ($8/month) are reporting seeing in-app ads from companies such as FT, Shein, and Amazon Prime Day. According to their pricing page, “ads may appear for users on the Free and Go plans.” No ads are currently shown to users on higher plans (e.g. ChatGPT Plus).

It’s no secret that OpenAI has been trying to pivot towards an ad-based model. They had a presence at the Cannes Lions advertising festival earlier this year, which is usually attended by media buyers and brand managers, not AI safety experts. A hybrid subscription / ad model is rare in software products, which usually choose between one or the other. Go plans are positioned to be affordable enough to upsell free users, but not so much that users balk at paying the whole amount. Apparently, they are using ads to bridge the difference.

1Why this matters for how you think about 'free'

Ad-based AI is no different than ad-based social media. You are not the customer, you are the product, and your eyeballs are being sold to advertisers. In dual models (subscription + ads), the ads tend to grow over time because that’s where the economic incentives lie. Note that OpenAI has had this policy listed on their pricing page since at least January — the current controversy is over the implementation of ads, not the policy itself.

At the moment, the ads don’t seem to be personalized. No one is seeing ads for finance if they queried ChatGPT about personal finance management. They appear to be standard display ads inserted into the UI. This could evolve. In response to the news, Anthropic posted some videos making fun of OpenAI, highlighting that Claude doesn’t have any ads right now at any subscription level. If you don’t want to see ads on Go, you can either pay for a more expensive plan or use uBlock Origin with Firefox (it seems to block the banners).

2What this signals about the AI market

Frontier AI companies are burning cash faster than they can raise it through subscriptions. OpenAI is allegedly losing tens of billions of dollars each year. Advertising is one of the fastest ways to generate revenue without developing new features. Just like email, search, and social media before it, products will start out free or low cost, accumulate massive user numbers, and slowly introduce ads to monetize their captive audience. Will this influence model training, fine-tuning, or the system prompt’s implicit biases?