OpenAI presents advertising as the financial backbone for broader free access to ChatGPT; the harder question is whether that rapid commercial expansion can preserve the independence and privacy users expect from the assistant.

The ad experiment began in the United States in February, inserting a new revenue stream into a chatbot used by more than 1 billion people each week. The move was controversial from the outset, including criticism from rival Anthropic, but it placed OpenAI on a familiar Big Tech path as it prepares for a widely anticipated IPO and faces pressure to support its enormous valuation.¹

By May, OpenAI had opened its Ads Manager to self-service buyers. On Monday, the company said ChatGPT Ads had reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in fewer than 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers now on the platform. It said small and medium-sized businesses make up a “material share” of the business, while cost-per-click and outcome-optimized bidding account for most campaigns.²

The expansion is now moving beyond the U.S. ChatGPT Ads are available in more than 40 countries, and self-service purchases are launching across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. For OpenAI, the pitch is direct: ads sit alongside subscriptions, enterprise products and APIs in a diversified model designed to keep an ad-supported ChatGPT tier broadly available.³

But the company’s commercial logic rests on a trust pledge. OpenAI says ads are clearly labeled and kept separate from answers; advertisers do not get access to private conversations, and users can control personalization. “Advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT provides,” OpenAI said.³

That distinction will matter more as the platform turns conversations about jobs, renovations and purchases into advertising opportunities. OpenAI calls the early results proof it can scale responsibly. Skeptics will judge it by whether the wall between advice and advertising holds as the money accelerates.