A Space to Think

Anthropic just released an article titled Claude is a Space to Think, which takes a clear stance on advertising. It begins with an unequivocal statement:

“There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them.”

Then continues:

“But including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.

We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see ‘sponsored’ links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.”

This is in direct contrast to OpenAI, which plan to start displaying ads to adults in the U.S. on the free and Go tiers. It’s refreshing to see a company take a clear stance. Whether Anthropic sustains it over time is an open question, but the act of staking the position publicly creates accountability.

Instruments with a Singular Allegiance

Tools should be designed to serve your intention, not to hold it. They exist to translate your intention into a result as directly and precisely as possible.

The moment an AI assistant carries advertising, it acquires a second allegiance. Even if the ads are “clearly labeled and separate,” the product now serves two masters. The design decisions, the engagement metrics, the feature roadmap—all of it must now account for the advertiser’s interests alongside the user’s.

The absence of interruption isn’t a luxury—it’s a basic prerequisite for the kind of thinking an AI assistant enables. Anything that generates attentional residue is a corruption of the tool’s fundamental purpose.

The Ratchet

OpenAI promises that ads will be “separate and clearly labeled.” This promise has a long lineage of failure in the tech industry.

Early Google ads were a thin strip of text above organic results, set apart by a colored background. Today, the first full screen of many Google searches is ads, and the visual distinction between paid and organic results has been systematically eroded over two decades. Facebook’s News Feed launched without advertising. The design pressure is always in one direction: make the ad feel more native, more integrated, and less distinguishable. Not because anyone plans this at the outset, but because the revenue incentive rewards it quarter after quarter.

Anthropic names this dynamic directly: “advertising incentives, once introduced, tend to expand over time as they become integrated into revenue targets and product development, blurring boundaries that were once more clear-cut.” This isn’t cynicism; It’s just how organizational incentives work. The boundaries that seem firm at launch become negotiable once they’re standing between the company and its growth targets.

OpenAI’s own announcement already contains the seeds. Their vision includes users being able to “start a direct chat with a bot aligned with that advertiser”—not just ads adjacent to responses, but advertiser-controlled AI conversations embedded within the product. The boundary is blurring before testing has even scaled.

The Shortest Path

Perhaps the sharpest line in Anthropic’s piece: “The most useful AI interaction might be a short one.”

An ad-supported product has no structural reason to help you finish quickly. A tool designed as a space to think has every reason to. If you ask an AI to help you debug a function, the ideal outcome is a correct answer in one exchange. An ad-supported model that displays one ad per response has a subtle but real incentive to stretch that interaction across multiple turns.

The incentive may never be acted on deliberately. But it shapes the metrics the company optimizes for, which shapes the product over time. When engagement becomes a KPI, brevity becomes a cost.

Anthropic closes their piece with an image worth sitting with: "Open a notebook, pick up a well-crafted tool, or stand in front of a clean chalkboard, and there are no ads in sight." The best tools disappear into the work. That's a standard worth holding AI to. I don't know if Anthropic will hold this line forever. But I know which kind of tool I want to think with.