Here’s what’s on our plate today:

• 🔬 How AI chats pick ads, subs, or trust.

• 🧠 Chatbots and mental health, 6G, and Anthropic strategy.

• 💡 Audit how ads might bias answers across your AI stack.

• 📊 Poll: Would you trade AI purity for cheaper subscription pricing?

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

The Laboratory

Decoding AI’s slide into advertising

For much of human history, technology has served as a savior, making life easier for its users. However, developing and sharing technological advancements with the masses requires substantial capital and infrastructure, which must be paid for. For critical infrastructure, such as electricity grids and telecommunications, governments often provide aid to companies, helping reduce the cost of these technologies for end users.

However, for others, such as e-commerce and online platforms, the money often comes from subscribers willing to pay for a service or from advertisers seeking to use these platforms to grow their businesses.

When connection becomes monetization

Take, for instance, the business model of social media. In the early 2000s, when social media first emerged, it was marketed as a tool to help people connect with long-lost connections and make new ones.

However, as the platforms grew larger and more people adopted them, the cost of keeping them alive rose. Add to this pressure from investors, and the social media platform had little choice but to either ask users to subscribe or depend on advertisers to fund it.

As dependence on advertisers deepened, platforms began optimizing algorithms that controlled users' feeds to push them to engage with content, and advertisements overshadowed the initial promise of meaningful connections.

Today, social media platforms are optimized to generate revenue from advertising, far removed from their initial purpose of helping people connect.

AI’s familiar crossroads

2026 is also the year when companies that dominate the market for artificial intelligence tools are contemplating whether to follow social media’s footsteps or find new ways to fund their growth.

Currently, major players in the market are gearing up to take sides. On the one hand, companies like OpenAI have integrated advertising into their chatbots. On the other hand, companies like Anthropic are betting on subscriptions from end users and enterprises to fund them.

There is also a third approach, adopted by Perplexity, which, after becoming the first AI company to integrate ads into its chatbot’s responses, is about to abandon advertising.

To understand why these three approaches matter and how they will shape the future of AI, let us first examine Perplexity.

Perplexity’s advertising experiment

In 2024, well before others considered advertising, Perplexity became one of the first AI companies to approach advertisers.

At the time, the company said its ad program would be designed to generate revenue for both the company and its publisher partners, arguing that subscriptions alone cannot support a scalable model.

However, just two years later, the company went back on its earlier stand and told Financial Times that it was abandoning advertising because “a user needs to believe this is the best possible answer, to keep using the product and be willing to pay for it.”

Around the same time, OpenAI has also shifted its stance from no-ads to pro-ads. According to The Verge, the “clearly labeled” ads will appear in a separate area beneath user chats in ChatGPT, marking a major shift for the company and for the future of AI monetization.

Unlike what many believe, the real power of chatbots is not their ability to act as companions. Rather, it is their ability to transform how humans retrieve information.

A 2024 Gartner forecast predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop by 25% by 2026 due to AI chatbots and virtual agents. Data has tracked that trajectory closely. According to OneLittleWeb's analysis, the top 10 AI chatbots collectively received 55.2B visits between April 2024 and March 2025, an 80.92% year-over-year increase, while the top 10 search engines saw a 0.51% decline over the same period. While the drop in search results isn't as drastic as one might expect, Google is pushing AI-powered overviews as an alternative to link-based results.

As such, the AI Overviews feature, which presents synthesized answers directly in search results, is accelerating the zero-click era.

The rise of the single answer

According to Seer Interactive research analyzing over 25M impressions across 42 organizations, organic click-through rates on queries with AI Overviews fell 61% between mid-2024 and September 2025, from 1.76% to 0.61%.

In this operating context, AI chatbots are absorbing the information-seeking behavior that search engines once captured, offering a fundamentally different user experience. Instead of scanning dozens of links, users receive a single synthesized answer and bet that it is honest.

For AI companies still expanding their user base, ensuring users continue to trust their chatbots despite advertising is not easy, as Perplexity found.

A Perplexity executive told the Financial Times: “The challenge with advertising is that it makes users suspicious of everything. That’s why we don’t think it’s beneficial to focus on advertising at this time.”

The company is now betting on subscriptions and enterprise sales. It reached $200M in annualized revenue by October 2025, with the majority coming from paid plans at $20 and $200 per month, and was most recently valued at $18B to $20B, according to reporting from Gigazine and Techloy.

Scale changes the math

However, subscriptions might work for Perplexity; they alone will not be enough to prevent OpenAI from allowing advertisements on ChatGPT, given the sheer scale of its operations and its plans to expand.

The company generates approximately $20B in annualized revenue, but according to Fortune reporting cited by Carnegie Invest, projects $74B in operating losses by 2028 alone. While it addresses the losses, the company has also committed $1.4T in infrastructure spending over eight years, putting it in a difficult position.

Adding to OpenAI’s problems is that only approximately 20M of its 800M weekly active users pay for premium tiers, per European Business Magazine, a conversion rate under 3%.

As such, to make up for this rift, OpenAI is counting on advertisement revenue, which it hopes will generate $1B in 2026, scaling to nearly $25B by 2029.

So, while one AI company is giving up advertising revenue to gain user trust, another is being driven by the real-world economics to rely on advertisers.

The trust-first counterargument

Advertising may not be the only way out for AI companies, as Anthropic shows, which is targeting enterprise contracts and aiming to be profitable by 2028.

Anthropic recently aired a Super Bowl commercial depicting a fitness-coach AI interrupted by intrusive sponsorships, with the line: “There is a time and a place for ads, and AI chats aren’t it.” The ad boosted Claude’s daily active users, even as Sam Altman criticized the claim on X, calling it misleading and stating that his company would never use ads as Anthropic suggested.

However, in public discourse, Anthropic and Perplexity are positioning themselves as a subscription-first, trust-first camp. OpenAI and Google are building an ad infrastructure, dividing the industry into two camps.

When economics decide

Whatever happens in the coming months will be shaped less by executives making public statements about the role of advertising and more by the financial model behind those statements.

OpenAI has $1.4T in commitments and a 3% subscription conversion rate. Anthropic is targeting enterprise contracts and aims to be profitable by 2028. Perplexity is betting on professional subscribers who will pay for uncompromised answers. The market will test all three hypotheses simultaneously.

If the economic pressure wins, and the historical record gives little reason to think it will not, then AI companies will follow the same arc that search engines and social platforms followed before them.

The tool that began as an honest advisor will become an attention platform that serves the interests of the advertisers who fund it. The human asking the question will once again become the product being sold to the highest bidder.

The question, then, is not whether AI companies want this to happen. The question is whether the economics give them a choice. Based on the prior chapters of this story, the answer is no. Unless a new model emerges, the incentive will eventually decide, and humans will end up where they were before: not the users of the tool, but the raw material for it.

Bite-Sized Brains

• AI chats & mental health: New Danish research links heavy chatbot use to worse symptoms for people already diagnosed with mental illness, raising flags about relying on AI for emotional support.

• 6G from space: Telecom researchers pitch 6G that fuses satellites, AI, and sensing to track devices and even people in real time, promising coverage upgrades while supercharging surveillance risks.

• Anthropic in a bind: After refusing Pentagon work on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, Anthropic faces losing contracts in a regulatory vacuum. Critics say the big labs created themselves.

Prompt Of The Day

Tuesday Poll

The Toolkit

• Dust: AI workspace that lets your team build secure copilots on top of internal docs, apps, and data.

• Krea: Real-time AI canvas for generating and editing images or video from text prompts and sketches.

• Lavender: AI sales email coach that scores your drafts, suggests edits, and improves reply rates.

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