OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed his willingness to accept the idea of including ads on his ChatGPT platform, saying he’s “not totally against it,” even going so far as to describe Instagram ads as “kind of cool.”
“We haven’t launched any advertising products yet, but honestly, I’m not opposed to the idea,” Altman said in response to a question during the first episode of OpenAI’s official podcast about the possibility of including ads on the world’s leading artificial intelligence platform.
“I can point to some examples that I like, like Instagram ads. They’re kind of cool, and I’ve bought a lot of things through them. But I think it would be difficult to implement, and it would require a lot of care to get the right result.”
Experts believe Altman’s main message was clear: OpenAI doesn’t rule out introducing ads in the future, even though it hasn’t taken any official steps in this direction yet.
So far, OpenAI has not relied on advertising as a revenue source.
The company raised an unprecedented $40 billion in funding in March 2025, the largest private funding round in the history of the technology sector, along with $6.6 billion in support from Microsoft and Nvidia in October 2024. The company also recently signed a $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense.
This massive funding comes amid estimates that the cost of operating ChatGPT ranges between $3 and $4 billion annually.
OpenAI expects its revenue to reach $12.7 billion by 2025, driven by a user base of 20 million subscribers.
This isn’t the first time the topic of advertising has been brought up in ChatGPT. In 2024, during a panel discussion at Harvard Business School, Altman described advertising as a “last resort,” expressing his desire to avoid this path.
However, his comments in March 2025 revealed a shift in his position, when he said, “Maybe there’s an elegant way to deliver ads, but I don’t know yet.”
In the same vein, Google is also moving toward integrating advertising into its AI tools.
The company has begun testing native ads within the Gemini platform (formerly known as Bard), an experiment aimed at introducing “natural” advertising content that aligns with the context of the conversation without disrupting the user.
In April 2024, The Information reported that Google had experimented with inserting featured advertising links into Gemini text responses, which would appear to users as suggested answers to their queries, creating an advertising experience closer to what is known as “native advertising.”
This shift comes as Google seeks to maintain its dominance in digital advertising, particularly with the increasing reliance on generative AI tools in searches. This could lead to a decline in visits to traditional search engines and, consequently, lower advertising revenue.