OpenAI will soon be walking down the path of an advertisement supported business model, as the artificial intelligence (AI) company says users who use ChatGPT for Free or are subscribed to the affordable Go plan will start seeing ads in their conversations in the coming months. This rollout will start with users in the US, and eventually go global. This is, in corporate terms, as clear a volte-face as you’d ever seen.
Here’s some context. As far back as in May 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said advertisements on ChatGPT will be a last resort. His exact words at the time, “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model.” Fast forward to January of 2026, “It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don’t want to pay, so we are hopeful a business model like this can work.” Somewhere in-between, in an official OpenAI podcast, Altman had openly wondered how humans managed to raise children in the years before AI.
OpenAI makes it clear that ads will not appear in conversations when a user is talking to ChatGPT about sensitive subjects such as health, mental health, or politics. The company also won’t show ads to teens under the age of 18 (and this will also use predictive methods, in case a user hasn’t explicitly shared their age). OpenAI also insists that in-conversation ads do not influence the answers. If users want an ad-free ChatGPT experience, they’d need to pay for the Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise subscriptions.
The move marks ChatGPT on the path to being one of the largest online advertising platforms, alongside Google Search and Meta’s social media apps. OpenAI had reported more than 800 million weekly active users, in late 2025.
Balancing ads with everything else
Nevertheless, with OpenAI now talking up their approach to advertising, it is important to weigh this against the broader scoped Privacy Policy (the version we are referring to, is the latest one, published 27 June 2025), with some contrasts in claims that will be quite clear to anyone reading attentively.
The Privacy Policy reads, “We don’t “sell” Personal Data or “share” Personal Data for cross-contextual behavioral advertising, and we do not process Personal Data for “targeted advertising” purposes (as those terms are defined under state privacy laws).” This should simply make advertising, if followed to the fullest, untenable.
The Ad Principles insists that while advertisements users see within ChatGPT will be within the conversation interface (and expected to be related to that conversation), these “Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.”
It is difficult to imagine how OpenAI will be able to serve ads without accessing the contents and context of a conversation, and OpenAI’s claims haven’t been independently verified yet. Any ad-supported business model will inevitably use data for optimised and contextual ads, for highest click throughs and interactions, as the business model demands.
OpenAI’s new Ad Principles clearly suggest that OpenAI will “keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.” However, the Privacy Policy’s wordings read, “When you use our Services, we collect Personal Information that is included in the input, file uploads, or feedback that you provide to our Services.”
The Privacy Policy repeatedly makes it clear that OpenAI will use a user’s personal information to “improve our Services” — and one of these mentioned services now happens to include an online advertisement platform.
The new Ads Principles also makes it clear that a user has control over how their data is used. “You can turn off personalization, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time,” the principles say. This means data for the purpose of advertisement delivery is enabled by default for all users using ChatGPT for free or on the Go subscription tier. For the argument that this data isn’t being shared with advertisers directly, may be true — just that OpenAI may well build relevant user profiles to serve ads.
This takes us back to the Privacy Policy, which at this time reads, “We don’t “sell” Personal Data or “share” Personal Data for cross-contextual behavioral advertising, and we do not process Personal Data for “targeted advertising” purposes”. So far, OpenAI’s policy allows for collection of data from prompts, files uploaded into the chatbot, images or audio shared, location data, device info, and time zone, as well as a sketch of usage patterns, which they say is for improving the service, research, as well as training the models that power ChatGPT.
Chances are, this data will now be the foundation of an ad-supported service.
OpenAI had been hinting at ads for a while now, and the AI company had also experimented with app promotions in late 2025, something they rolled back after user’s expressed frustration over the changes. OpenAI says ads are important now, “so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits.” Which raises a question — if advertisements in ChatGPT were a last resort, what does it really mean for OpenAI’s long-term business health?