The first real AI platform war is about ads (and that should worry builders)

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This week, Anthropic went properly on the offensive.

According to Reuters, Anthropic is spending millions on Super Bowl ads that take a swipe at OpenAI’s reported plans to introduce advertising in ChatGPT. The Guardian also covered the spat, framing it as a public fight over the future business model of consumer AI assistants.

On the surface, it’s petty: two AI companies bickering like rival mobile networks in the 2000s.

Underneath, it’s a clear signal that the “AI assistant” category is splitting into two futures:

1. High-trust tools (you pay, you get a clean experience, your attention isn’t the product)

2. Ad-funded platforms (mass scale, monetised via targeting, sponsored answers, and inevitably: incentives you don’t control)

Why this matters (even if you never run ads)

If you’re building products on top of LLMs, you’re not just picking a model. You’re picking a set of incentives.

An assistant that’s expected to maximise revenue (ads) behaves differently than one that’s expected to maximise outcomes (subscription). Those incentives seep into everything: ranking, recommendations, “helpfulness”, what gets summarised, what gets omitted, what gets nudged.

And as builders, we’re downstream of that. You can write the best app in the world, but if the underlying platform starts optimising for someone else’s outcome, you inherit that risk.

The product lesson: conversation is becoming premium real estate

A chat interface looks simple. But once it becomes the default way people make decisions (“Which tool should I use?”, “Which contractor should I hire?”, “Which SaaS should I buy?”), it becomes incredibly valuable inventory.

So it makes sense that ads show up here first. It’s not the banner ad era. It’s sponsored intent.

The uncomfortable question: when an AI assistant recommends something, will you ever know if that recommendation was “true” or “paid”?

What I think will happen next

My take (and I’m happy to be proven wrong):

  • Ads will start as “light touch” sponsored suggestions.
  • Then the “sponsored” label becomes easy to miss.
  • Then ad-free becomes the upsell.
  • Then enterprise SKUs demand auditability and strict controls, because no regulated workflow can tolerate hidden incentives.

This will get messy fast.

BuildrLab’s angle (how I’d de-risk this as a builder)

If you’re building on LLMs and you want your product to be stable, you want:

  • Multiple provider support (so you’re not hostage to one platform shift)
  • Clear separation between “your app logic” and “the model”
  • Observability (you need to detect behaviour drift early)
  • A business model that doesn’t rely on the model provider staying “nice”

That’s part of why we’re pushing hard on BAF internally: repeatable infrastructure, clean boundaries, and control over operational risk.

Sources

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