Anthropic executive on spending, ads, Claude Cowork market sell-off

Anthropic is focused on growing its business rather than making “flashy headlines,” its commercial chief told CNBC in a thinly-veiled swipe at rival OpenAI as the public war of words between the AI giants continues.

Anthropic aired ads at Sunday’s Super Bowl taking a dig at OpenAI’s decision to begin testing ads on ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Anthropic’s ad “deceptive.” It comes as the leading AI model players are locked in an intensifying battle to sign up businesses to use their products.

In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, Smith also said the market sell-off in software stocks, sparked by Anthropic’s Claude Cowork tool, was “a lot of hyperbole.”

Anthropic spent millions on its Super Bowl commercials, a 60-second pregame ad and a 30-second in-game ad, which stressed said: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Smith told CNBC it was a “conscious decision” not to include ads in Claude. Advertising would take Anthropic in “directions where you’re optimizing for the wrong things,” he said. He added that, without ads, the company can focus on areas such as making AI models more intelligent and being “genuinely helpful, safe, and trusted.”

While OpenAI has a large consumer focus with ChatGPT, Anthropic has focused on selling its AI to businesses.

Smith said Anthropic is “unconflicted” by not offering ads, as it focuses on selling its AI to businesses.

“We’re not fighting another partner for eyeballs or for ad revenue or anything,” he added.

“Our focus is on model quality, model efficacy, how it can integrate across the wider enterprise, which comes back to all of the investments that we’re really focused on… we are exclusively focused on a different set of things. Our attention is not split.”

Altman said Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads were “funny” but “clearly dishonest,” adding that OpenAI would “obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them.”

OpenAI had not responded to a CNBC request for comment as this article went live.

Anthropic has committed $50 billion to building data centers in the U.S., but it also spends money buying compute from players like Microsoft and Google. Meanwhile, OpenAI has committed more than $1 trillion to future infrastructure developments with partners including Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom.

When asked about Anthropic’s approach to infrastructure compared with companies like OpenAI, Smith said: “We’ve made less flashy headlines than some, and we’ve been focused on growing revenue and winning business, rather than spending money and announcing the biggest compute deals that we possibly could.”

OpenAI announced a string of partnerships in recent months. Among them, Nvidia said it would commit $100 billion to support OpenAI as it builds and deploys at least 10…