As the public war of words between the AI giants continues, Anthropic is focused on growing its business rather than making “big headlines,” the company’s head of commercial told CNBC in a thinly veiled criticism of rival OpenAI.
Anthropic aired an ad during Sunday’s Super Bowl criticizing OpenAI’s decision to begin testing ads on ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Anthropic’s ads “deceptive.” This comes as major AI model companies are locked in an escalating battle to get companies to register to use their products.
In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, Smith also said that the market decline in software stocks stemming from Anthropic’s Claude Cowork tool is “a huge exaggeration.”
super bowl advertising battle
Anthropic spent millions of dollars on a Super Bowl commercial, a 60-second pregame ad, and a 30-second in-game ad, emphasizing that “advertising is coming for AI, but not for Claude.”
Smith told CNBC that it was a “conscious decision” not to advertise on Claude. The ads will lead Anthropic “in the direction of optimizing the wrong thing,” he said. He added that without ads, the company can focus on areas such as making its AI models more intelligent and “truly useful, safe and reliable.”
While OpenAI focuses primarily on consumers with ChatGPT, Anthropic focuses on selling its AI to enterprises.
Smith said Anthropic is focused on selling its AI to businesses, so there is “no conflict” in not offering advertising.
“We’re not competing with other partners for eyeballs or ad revenue or anything like that,” he added.
“What we’re focused on is the quality of the model, the effectiveness of the model, how to integrate it across the broader enterprise, and this comes down to all the investments that we’re really focused on… We’re just focused on a different set of things. Our attention isn’t divided.”
Altman called Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad “funny” but “clearly dishonest,” adding that OpenAI “obviously wouldn’t run an ad like the one Anthropic drew.”
OpenAI had not responded to CNBC’s request for comment as of this article’s publication.
“Flashy headline”
Infrastructure spending has become a key focus for investors after the latest Big Tech earnings season, with companies from Alphabet to Amazon ramping up capital spending plans for 2026.
Anthropic is spending $50 billion to build data centers in the U.S., but it’s also spending money to buy computing from companies such as: microsoft and google. Meanwhile, OpenAI has committed more than $1 trillion to future infrastructure development with partners including: NvidiaOracle and Broadcom.
When asked about Anthropic’s approach to infrastructure compared to companies like OpenAI, Smith said: “We haven’t made as many headlines as some companies, and we’ve been more focused on growing revenue and winning business rather than spending money and announcing the biggest computing deals possible.”
OpenAI has announced a series of partnerships in recent months. In it, Nvidia announced it would commit $100 billion to support OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems.
Most recently, OpenAI announced a $10 billion deal with chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 750 megawatts of Cerebras’ AI chips. We have other agreements AMD and broadcom.
Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reinforced the idea of ”doing more with less,” saying the company takes a more disciplined approach to spending than other companies.
Smith said Anthropic’s leadership is discussing how much to spend on daily computing. But he added that he was “comfortable” with the spending as demand remained strong.
“This is not like we’re buying ahead of demand,” Smith said, praising the “incredible growth” of Claude Code and Cowork, the two main products Anthropic sells to businesses. Mr Smith added: “There has been incredible growth across the enterprise business and we absolutely need to be happy with this.”
Smith added that the company is constantly reviewing its spending commitments. “We’re looking at buying just the right amount of compute as possible to maintain that all-important acceleration curve. Not too much, not too little, because too little is bad for our customers,” he said, adding that more infrastructure announcements would be made soon.
Smith spoke Wednesday after Anthropic partnered with investment management firm Man Group, which uses Anthropic’s AI products. The two companies also plan to jointly develop new tools.
software meltdown
Software stocks took a big hit last week after Anthropic’s productivity tool Claude Cowork gained traction. Investors worried that AI could perform many of the processes for which companies pay multiple software vendors.
When asked if companies are considering using Anthropic’s products to phase out their legacy software, Smith said it depends on the organization.
Smith told CNBC that some organizations are “doubling down” on software, while others are considering tools like Anthropic.
“There was a lot of hyperbole in the market last week,” Smith said.
“As many have pointed out, these applications were performing some very important tasks within the enterprise,” Smith said, referring to the current software used in organizations.
“They have some very specific data models. They have some very specific workflows that organizations get tremendous value from over a very long period of time.”
