It's one of those marketing stunts where they take a dig at another company, then a year or so later find themselves doing the same thing.

Think of the Samsung headphone jack commercial.

Discussion:

Claude Is a Space to Think

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884883

Sam Altman responds to Anthropic's "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" ads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46894151

Those ads are definitely destined to age like milk.

I'm not sure. Anthropic probably feels safe enough for the foreseeable future given that they've been focused heavily on business customers (cowork, claude code) who just pay straight up for the service.

Whereas OpenAI seems to be huge in the consumer market (where downward pressure on pricing make ads more likely). They're trying with Codex but all the other stuff (the legal, financial, tooling with cowork, etc) seem to be a lot more fleshed out on the Claude side.

So they can probably get away with this for a while. That's my guess though.