Cofounder and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei (Chesnot/Getty Images)

Anthropic pledges no ads for Claude

The move defines Anthropic’s AI offering as an alternative to competitors planning to integrate ads in AI chats.

2/4/26 10:48AM

AI services are popping up everywhere. Pretty much every software product has crammed AI features into its apps, and soon most phones will offer quick access to an AI chat. As AI chatbots proliferate, users will start looking for distinguishing features that might be worth paying for.

Today, Anthropic announced a significant policy that will definitely set it apart from the competition: its Claude chatbot will remain ad-free.

In the blog post titled “Claude is a space to think,” the company wrote:

“We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see ‘sponsored’ links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.”

Claude has a pretty teeny share of the consumer chatbot market. But OpenAI, xAI, and Google’s Gemini will all have ads integrated into chat responses soon. Considering the sensitive nature of how people use AI today, trust that those conversations won’t be exploited for ad revenue could be an important feature.

To underscore the new pledge, Anthropic has created a series of new ads that show how creepy and jarring AI chats with ads could become. One of the ads will be running during the Super Bowl, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Anthropic isn’t as focused on consumer subscriptions, as its runaway success with enterprise customers who pay for Claude APIs is powering the company’s rapid growth.

Yesterday, the market was positively spooked by the latest superpowers that Anthropic added to its Claude Cowork agentic AI tool. The capabilities that the new plug-ins cover include helping with legal tasks, finance, marketing, and product management. The arrival of the new tools made investors question entire tech companies’ business models, dragging the market down.

Constitutional amendment

Last week, Anthropic made some significant changes to Claude’s “constitution” — the set of rules, values, and priorities that guide its responses. One of the core principles is that Claude must be helpful. Anthropic says these instructions conflict with the incentives created in an ad-supported product:

“The history of ad-supported products suggests that advertising incentives, once introduced, tend to expand over time as they become integrated into revenue targets and product development, blurring boundaries that were once more clear-cut. We’ve chosen not to introduce these dynamics into Claude.”

Miranda Bogen is director of the AI Governance Lab at the tech policy nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. Bogen warns that ads can have a huge impact on tech platforms with big consequences.

“Anthropic’s announcement that it won’t incorporate ads into Claude engages honestly with the fact that advertising can cultivate deeply perverse incentives, even when platforms claim otherwise,” she said. “The choices that advanced AI companies make today about how they’ll cover the mind-boggling costs they are taking on to build AI systems will inevitably shape the systems themselves. That could have an enormous impact on our world for decades to come.”

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5