The new cola wars are upon us—but this time it’s the battle of AI
Days before the Super Bowl, Anthropic dropped a handful of Super Bowl ads taking aim at OpenAI’s impending advertising model for ChatGPT. The ads anthropomorphize OpenAI’s platform, imagining how the chatbot might answer everyday questions like “What do you think of my business idea?” and “Can I get a six-pack quickly?” The answers, delivered by actors in cheerfully sycophantic robot speak, start out sounding like stilted but helpful advice, before veering into promotional marketing speak for a hypothetical advertiser on ChatGPT.
Immediately, the ads sparked a firestorm online. Some called them brilliant. Others called them mean-spirited. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman felt so strongly, he crafted an earnest post on X about why Anthropic’s ads were so misleading.
But wrong move, bro. Anthropic, one of your AI rivals, just handed OpenAI—and the entire AI industry—a huge gift. Not to mention the ad business.
An ad battle for the AI age
Not since the days of Coke and Pepsi have we seen this kind of ire slung at a category competitor. And I just have to say: I’m here for it.
We are at a pivotal time for AI development and adoption across business and culture, with issues ranging from mass layoffs to people using LLMs for dating advice. But AI is also in its brand infancy, with some platforms building massive name recognition but very little brand image.
There is no better category than AI to start a full-on advertising battle in 2026, and there are no two better companies to wage it than Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic has long framed its Claude platform as a more refined LLM than its OpenAI counterpart. And its Super Bowl ads are delivering an implicit message about the competition: You can’t trust them.
Created by award-winning ad agency Mother, the new Anthropic campaign, “A Time and a Place,” has four spots in total (two are big-game bound). “People want an AI they can trust—one that’s focused solely on working for them. We want Claude to be that choice,” Andrew Stirk, Anthropic’s head of marketing, said in a statement.
When OpenAI’s Altman opined on X that it’s “on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real,” perhaps he should turn that into a brief for his growing all-star internal marketing team (imagine a 1984-style ad for 2026). I mean, he even has Brandon McGraw, former head of consumer marketing at Anthropic, on the roster.
Same story with his second attempt at a clapback: “More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the U.S., so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do.” What about an AI Challenge ad set in El Paso or Brownsville where they go full “Get a Mac” and paint Claude as the snooty also-ran to ChatGPT’s bot of the people?
This consumer-facing dichotomy is the perfect setup for an advertising battle. You’ve got two brands offering ostensibly the same thing (at least to the average person), just with different positioning. But—as Coke and Pepsi demonstrated—even though brands involved in street fights like this do get a few ego bruises, historically the creative arms race helps both emerge in a stronger position with their audiences.
Challenger game
The decades-long scrap between Coca-Cola and Pepsi is well-documented, but its dynamics have been replicated in various ways over the years in other product categories like tech, fast food, and telecom.
There’s a typical anatomy to ad wars that cuts across industries. At their most basic, these campaigns always begin with a challenger brand calling out a much bigger rival by name. For Pepsi, which began the cola wars with less than 20% market share, that meant the Pepsi Challenge—showing real people choosing Pepsi over Coke in blind taste tests. This year, it meant hijacking Coke’s familiar polar bear for the Super Bowl.
Apple’s “Get a Mac” is widely considered one of the best long-running advertising campaigns of all time. Apple was the challenger (if you can believe that) depicting the dominant PC brands (Microsoft Windows) as dull, cumbersome, and just plain uncool.
Of course, the challenger brand is in the eye of the beholder, and in 2011 it was Samsung mocking iPhone fanboys for lining up to get what it deemed an inferior product.
Over in fast food, Burger King had an award-winning run of work in the late 2010s under then-CMO Fernando Machado, much of which directly involved McDonald’s. To promote the nonprofit Peace One Day, Burger King took out ads and built an entire website proposing to McDonald’s that the rivals make peace to create the ultimate burger—the McWhopper. The ad had $220 million in earned media value, and 8.9 billion impressions. In 2018, Burger King created print ads with photos of barbecue grills at former homes of ex-McDonald’s executives to highlight the flame-grilled taste of Whoppers.
That same year, it launched “Whopper Detour,” a promo campaign that used geofencing to offer a 1-cent Whopper to users who ordered through the Burger King app while within 600 feet of a McDonald’s. It got 1.5 million Burger King app downloads in nine days.
Even Taco Bell took a swing at the golden arches when it launched a breakfast menu in 2014. For its largest marketing campaign ever up to that point, Taco Bell recruited real guys named Ronald McDonald to testify to the tastiness of its Breakfast Crunchwrap.
Whether people were emotionally invested because they loved one of these brands over the other, or they were just there for the LOLs, each of these sparked two things brands crave absolutely—attention and excitement.
Strategic response
A 2025 INSEAD study called “The Power of Strategic Rivalry” found that a well-managed rivalry can extend the story between competitors, keeping consumers tuned in longer and—importantly—benefiting both sides with ongoing engagement and relevance. People love a good brand fight.
Coca-Cola maintained its lead throughout the cola wars, but Pepsi’s market share shot up from 20% to a peak of 30%-plus in the 1990s. And their ad war not only helped increase overall soda consumption from 12.4% of American beverage consumption in 1970 to 22.4% in 1985, but each brand more than doubled revenues over the 1980s. And thanks to the sheer intensity and ad frequency during the most heated years of their ad battle, the brands elbowed their way to the center of pop culture. Between 1975 and 1995, Coke’s annual ad spending went from about $25 million to $112 million, while Pepsi’s grew from $18 million to $82 million.
The haymakers from challenger brands are to be expected. But rarely, if ever, do the bigger brands respond with the same level of bite. In fact, the most successful responses have been investing in better creative brand work done more often.
McDonald’s didn’t use its global domination to swipe down at Burger King. Instead it invested in and celebrated its existing fans in fun and unique ways. Specifically, with the Famous Orders work that began with Travis Scott in 2020 and expanded to collaborators as varied as Mariah Carey, BTS, and Cactus Plant Flea Market, driving record app usage, hundreds of millions in sales, and making new fans of younger customers.
OpenAI appears to be taking a similar tack in its advertising, at least so far. The brand is focusing on how its tools can inspire and enable people to build new things. Its three regional Super Bowl spots are about how three different American small businesses—a seed farm, a metal salvage yard, and a family-run tamale shop—are utilizing ChatGPT to grow and thrive.
OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch admits the Anthropic spots are funny, but since ads haven’t landed in ChatGPT yet, it’s a complete fabrication of what that experience will be like. When I spoke to her this week, she took issue with the spots calling OpenAI’s use of advertising to support free access to the tools as a “violation,” and reiterated Altman’s point that ChatGPT has more free monthly users in Texas than Anthropic has globally.
“And our perspective is that open, free access to this technology will enable individual people to build things that will benefit them and us all,” Rouch told me. “It really all comes down to self-empowerment and being able to do things that you either didn’t believe you could do before or you actually couldn’t do before. And that’s the whole game.”
This is a more sound strategy, both overall and in light of Anthropic’s trolling, than last year’s animated Super Bowl ad that had many people guessing just what the hell it was trying to say.
If this is the dawn of AI’s version of the cola wars—and I hope it is—it’s an impressive start for both brands.
Anthropic’s challenger strategy here hits, not just for the cojones to step up to the Super Bowl against a much bigger rival. The key to any challenger swipe that actually works hinges on its creative execution, and these spots steer clear of the slop to serve up a bona fide chef’s kiss.
For OpenAI, creatively telling real stories about real people using its tools to solve real problems and build real things looks less like an advertising street fight and more like a turn for the high road toward the brand image promised land.