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OpenAI said it will start testing ads in ChatGPT on Tuesday afternoon, initially showing them to users on the free and Go tiers. The company said the trial ads will be clearly
labeled and “visually separated” from the chatbot’s responses, and that they will be “optimized based on what’s most helpful to you.” Ads will be targeted using the current conversation topic, a user’s prior chats, and past interactions with ads.
OpenAI said the ads would not influence the chatbot’s replies, and that users will have the choice to prevent OpenAI from offering personalized ads based on user interests.
OpenAI has been teasing the introduction of ads for weeks.
In a post on X in mid-January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the company would start testing ads but stressed “we will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you and we keep your conversations private from advertisers.”
OpenAI said it will “build protections to reduce the risk of scams and other harmful or misleading ads” and that it will not display ads for users under the age of 18, as determined by OpenAI’s predictions or the user’s own data.
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT’s Go tier in January. The Go tier costs $8 a month and gives users increased access to file uploads, image creation, and messaging compared to the Free tier.
While OpenAI competitor Google has also recently indicated that its AI platforms will feature ads in 2026, OpenAI rival Anthropic has declared that it will avoid placing ads in its Claude chatbot service for now.
In a blog post announcing the decision to forego ads last Wednesday, Anthropic wrote that “including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible” with positioning Claude as “a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.”
