OpenAI Puts Advertisers Third as It Builds ChatGPT Ads Business

OpenAI has onboarded more than 50 ad tech, measurement and agency partners since launching its advertising business less than a year ago — and the company says advertisers rank third in its priorities, behind user trust and user value. Benji Shomair, OpenAI's VP of monetization, laid out the hierarchy at LUMA's Digital Media Summit in New York City on Monday.

Shomair, who joined OpenAI last December after helping build Meta's ads business, framed the ad push as mission-driven rather than revenue-hungry. OpenAI's charter commits it to bringing the benefits of AGI (AI that can match or outdo people at intellectual tasks) to all of humanity, and that means reaching far more users than will ever pay for a subscription. Fulfilling the mission, he said, "actually requires [us] to build an ad business."

"We believe this technology is so beneficial, so incremental, so powerful," he said, "that we need to create economic means to make it available to everyone."

On the partner surge, he added: "We're taking a partner-first approach. We can't do it all ourselves; it's pragmatic."

Why the ordering matters for buyers

What does this change for advertisers planning ChatGPT placements? Mainly the boundaries. Shomair said OpenAI regularly rejects partner requests that would compromise its principles.

"There are places where I think our partners would like us to do certain things that we just can't," he said. "And that's because of how we think about making decisions."

He didn't name specific rejected tactics, so treat claims about blocked formats as speculation until OpenAI confirms them.

The sensitivity comes from context. "In my experience, ads or commercial messages haven't ever been introduced into as intimate an environment as ChatGPT," Shomair said. "Just think about the things that people are sharing with ChatGPT."

Five principles, set before testing

OpenAI wrote its five advertising principles before it even started internal ad tests, and they still guide every product decision:

• Mission alignment (bringing AGI to the masses)
• Answer independence
• Conversation privacy
• Choice and control
• Prioritizing user trust and experience over revenue

"We reference these principles on a pretty consistent basis," Shomair said, "and we use this as a way to communicate to our audiences how we're thinking about trust."

Answers in ChatGPT "are separate from the ads and not influenced by the ads," he insisted — the answer-independence principle in practice.

The Anthropic cautionary tale — in reverse

Rival Anthropic's Super Bowl spots for Claude mocked the idea of ads inside AI chats. In one, a trainer responds to a six-pack question by hawking height-boosting insoles; in another, a therapist plugs a dating site for "sensitive cubs" and "roaring cougars."

The joke landed commercially. Claude's daily downloads jumped from roughly 63,000 in January to a peak of about 225,000 in mid-February, per Appfigures, and daily active users rose 11% after the game, according to BNP Paribas. Shomair conceded the ads were funny but said they don't reflect OpenAI's approach.

What happens when agents do the talking

Shomair acknowledged that nobody — including OpenAI — knows what advertising should look like when consumers talk to a brand's AI agent, when personal agents shop for their owners, or when two agents negotiate with each other.

"It's hard to forecast beyond six to 12 months," he said. "The products I was working with 12 months ago versus the products I'm working on now — it's like night and day."

His advice to advertisers was blunt: "You've got to get your hands dirty. You've got to jump in and play with it." For practitioners, that means experimenting with ChatGPT placements now, within guardrails that will keep tightening around anything that touches answer integrity or conversation data.