Anthropic executive on spending, ads, Claude Cowork market sell-off
Anthropic’s chief commercial officer told CNBC that it is focused on growing its business rather than making “flashy headlines,” taking a thinly veiled swipe at rival OpenAI as the public war of words between AI giants continues.
Anthropic ads aired during Sunday’s Super Bowl examining OpenAI’s decision to start testing ads on ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Anthropic’s advertising “deceptive.” This comes at a time when leading AI model players are locked in an increasing scramble to sign up businesses to use their products.
In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, Smith also said the market selloff in software stocks triggered by Anthropic’s Claude Cowork vehicle was “a lot of hyperbole.”
Super Bowl ad war
Anthropic spent millions on this In Super Bowl commercials, a 60-second pre-game spot and a 30-second in-game spot highlighted: “Ads are coming to artificial intelligence. But not to Claude.”
Smith told CNBC that not adding ads to Claude was a “conscious decision.” He said the ads would take Anthropic “in directions where you’re optimizing for the wrong things.” He added that without ads, the company could focus on areas like making its AI models smarter and “truly useful, safe and reliable.”
OpenAI has a large consumer focus with ChatGPT, while Anthropic is focused on selling its AI to businesses.
Smith said Anthropic is “conflict-free” by not serving ads because it focuses on selling its AI to businesses.
“We’re not fighting another partner for eyeballs or ad revenue or anything,” he added.
“Our focus is on model quality, model efficiency and how that can be integrated into the broader organization, which really comes back to all the investments we focus on… We’re just focused on different things. Our attention is not divided.”
Altman said Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads were “funny” but “clearly fraudulent,” adding that OpenAI “frankly would never run ads the way Anthropic portrays.”
OpenAI did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment at the time this article went live.
‘Flashy headlines’
Infrastructure spending has become a key focus for investors following the last Big Tech earnings season, when companies from Alphabet to Amazon accelerated their capital spending plans for 2026.
When asked about Anthropic’s approach to infrastructure compared to companies like OpenAI, Smith said: “We’ve made less flashy headlines than some, and we’ve focused on growing revenue and winning business rather than spending money and announcing the biggest computing deals we can.”
OpenAI has announced a number of partnerships in recent months. Among them, Nvidia said it would commit $100 billion to support OpenAI while building and deploying at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems.
More recently, OpenAI announced a $10 billion deal with chipmaker Cerebras to distribute 750 megawatts of Cerebras AI chips. They have other agreements as well AMD And broadcom.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei reinforced the “do more with less” mentality and said the company was taking a more disciplined approach to spending than others.
Smith said Anthropic’s leadership discusses daily how much to spend on IT. But he added that he was “comfortable” with spending because demand remained strong.
“This is not us buying ahead of demand,” Smith said, praising the “incredible growth” in Claude Code and Cowork, two key products Anthropic sells to businesses. Smith added that there’s “incredible growth in corporate business overall that we absolutely need to satisfy.”
Smith added that the company constantly reviews its spending commitments. “We’re looking at buying the right amount of compute to keep us on this very, very important acceleration curve, and not going too much or too little, because too little would be bad for our customers,” he said, adding that more infrastructure announcements would be made soon.
Smith was speaking after Anthropic announced Wednesday a partnership with Man Group, an investment management firm that will use Anthropic’s artificial intelligence products. The companies will also produce new vehicles together.
software meltdown
Software stocks fell last week Hammering after Anthropic’s productivity tool Claude Cowork gained traction. Investors feared that AI could take over many of the processes by which companies pay multiple software vendors.
When asked if businesses are considering using Anthropic products to phase out software they traditionally use, Smith said it depends on the organization.
Smith told CNBC that some organizations are “doubling down” on software, while others are looking at tools like Anthropic’s.
“There was a lot of hype in the market last week,” Smith said.
“As many people have pointed out, these applications have performed some very important tasks in an organization,” Smith said, referring to existing software used in organizations. he said.
“There are some very specific data models. There are some very specific workflows that organizations will derive great value from over a very long period of time.”
