Brace yourselves, for your cozy little conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT are about to be stuffed with ads.
At least, that’s the findings of a software engineer who dug through the code of an experimental build of the chatbot’s app.
The engineer, Tibor Blaho, flagged roughly a dozen lines of code in the latest beta release of the ChatGPT app for Android, 1.2025.329, labelled “feature ads,” with strings referencing commercial-sounding stuff like “search ad,” “search ads carousel,” and “bazaar content.”
It’s yet another sign that OpenAI is preparing to cash in on its hundreds of millions of users by showing them ads, amid growing pressure on the company to demonstrate it can make a profit while its spending — and AI capital expenditures at large — continue to balloon past what subscriptions can support.
OpenAI leadership has played coy when asked about ads. Last December, chief financial officer Sarah Friar told the Financial Times that the company, now valued at around half a trillion dollars, was exploring an ad model, but then backtracked by stating there were “no active plans to pursue advertising.”
CEO Sam Altman has sent similarly mixed messages. He once called the idea of integrating ads into ChatGPT “unsettling” and described them as a “last resort.” But this year, Altman said he wasn’t “totally against” advertising, that it was something he expected to “try at some point,” and praised Instagram’s ad model (which, it’s worth noting, has attracted an immense amount of criticism from non-CEOs.)
The warning signs have been there, however, regardless of the execs’ messaging.
Amid Friar’s waffling on the issue, for instance, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI was poaching top ad talent from its rivals like Google and Meta, while posting ad-related job listings on LinkedIn.
And last month, The Information reported that OpenAI was considering showing individually-tailored ads based on ChatGPT’s memory of user interactions. The reporting noted that the AI startup had imported hundreds of ex-employees from Meta, an advertising juggernaut; in 2023, 98 percent of Meta’s over $130 billion revenue came from ads.
If ads do come to OpenAI’s products, the change will be a controversial one. ChatGPT has been completely ad free since its launch three years ago, becoming part of its appeal as an alternative to ad-stuffed search engines like Google. Moreover, the intrusion of ads could dispel some of the human-like familiarity that users have fostered with the chatbot.
It will also raise a host of ethical concerns. Users tend to share much more intimate details with a chatbot than they do a search bar, and the AI’s ability to act like a friend and a confidante — traits that are themselves controversial amid more and more accounts of so-called “AI psychosis” — could be repurposed for sleazy salesmanship. Chatbots, or at least the way the industry designs them, are inherently addictive and engaging; a Google search is not.
In any case, OpenAI wouldn’t be alone in going down this route. Google has been showing sponsored content in its infamously wonky AI Overviews for over a year. Perplexity has been experimenting with ads since last year, too, as has the Google-backed AI companion platform Chai.
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