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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has offered his most detailed public comments yet on the prospect of advertising within ChatGPT, signaling both openness to new monetization models and deep reservations about the risks to user trust and product integrity. In a podcast released this week, Altman addressed the growing speculation around OpenAI’s business strategy, especially as the company prepares to launch GPT-5 and faces mounting financial and legal pressures.
Altman confirmed that OpenAI has not yet launched any advertising product, but did not rule out the possibility. “I’m not totally against it. I can point to areas where I like ads. I think ads on Instagram are kinda cool. But I think it’d take a lot of care to get right,” he said, referencing his own positive experiences with well-executed digital advertising.
This measured openness comes as OpenAI’s user base continues to explode, with hundreds of millions of people relying on ChatGPT for everything from research to shopping — making it a highly attractive platform for advertisers. However, Altman was quick to draw a sharp distinction between OpenAI’s approach and that of traditional social media or search engines, where users are often aware that their experience is being shaped by commercial interests.
“If you compare us to social media or web search, where you can kinda tell that you are being monetized… how much do you believe you’re getting the thing that the company actually believes is the best content for you versus something that’s also trying to interact with the ads?” Altman asked, highlighting the psychological impact of ad-driven content on user trust.
Crucially, Altman made it clear that OpenAI would never allow advertiser influence to alter the core output of its language models. “If we started modifying the output, like the stream that comes back from the LLM, in exchange for who is paying us more, that would feel really bad. And I would hate that as a user, I think that’d be like a trust-destroying moment,” he said.
Instead, he floated the idea of monetizing through affiliate links or transaction revenue that do not affect the LLM’s responses, or by placing ads outside the main conversational stream — such as in a sidebar or footer — ensuring that the integrity of the AI’s answers remains untouched.
Altman’s comments reflect a longstanding ambivalence toward advertising within OpenAI’s leadership. While the company has hired executives with deep experience in digital ads and is under pressure to find new revenue streams, Altman himself has called ads a “last resort” and has voiced a clear preference for subscription-based models that maintain a “cleaner relationship” with users. He acknowledged that the “burden of proof” for any ad product would be “very high,” and that any solution would need to be “really useful to users and really clear that it was not messing with the LLM’s output”.
The stakes are obviously high as OpenAI moves into its next phase of growth. But as Altman’s comments make clear, any move in this direction will be cautious, user-focused, and subject to intense internal debate. For now, OpenAI’s leadership appears committed to upholding the core principle that the AI’s output should remain unbiased and untainted by advertiser interests.
As Altman summed up in an interview last month, “maybe there’s a tasteful way we can do ads, but I don’t know. I kind of just don’t like ads that much.” The coming months will reveal whether OpenAI can chart a new path for responsible, user-centric advertising — or whether the company will continue to rely on subscriptions and enterprise partnerships to fuel its next phase of growth.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
