Anthropic has announced that its chatbot is cloud. This is in direct contrast to rival company OpenAI, which has recently had many users.
The company says that “incorporating ads into conversations with the cloud would be inconsequential” and that chatbots would become “really helpful assistants for work and for deep thinking.” The logic here is quite simple. People use chatbots for the better, and getting ads based on that stuff would be scary. Imagine you’re seeking mental health advice and you get an advertisement for St. John’s wort or something.
Anthropic notes that other conversations “involve complex software engineering work, deep tasks, or thinking about difficult problems. The presence of ads in these contexts will feel incongruous – and, in many cases, inappropriate.”
The company said that integrating advertising would “do the opposite”, counting “being generally helpful” as a core principle. “Introducing advertising incentives at this stage would add another level of complexity. Our understanding of how models translate the goals we set into specific behaviors is still developing; so an advertising-based system could have unexpected consequences,” it reads in a blog post.
There are some real world concerns here. AI Companies and Returns. Advertising is an easy way to recoup some of that investment, which is probably why OpenAI took this path. Engadget contacted Anthropic to inquire about any upcoming financial hurdles that might force it to change course. A representative pointed to today’s blog post and said this is “all the information we have to share at this time.”
We know Anthropic is committed to commerce-based agentic AI. It added that it will “continue to build features that enable our users to find, compare or buy products, connect with businesses, and more.”
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