OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads across Europe

ChatGPT will start showing ads in several dozen European countries next week, its developer OpenAI announced in a blogpost on Tuesday.

The company began testing ads within its chatbot product in the United States back in February, with later pilots in countries including Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom.

Now, the first European Union countries – including Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands – will see ads in free and lower cost versions of ChatGPT.

Other paid and enterprise versions of the software will remain ad-free, per OpenAI.

The European launch covers 31 countries in all, marking its largest ad push so far. OpenAI argues that ads “democratise access” to ChatGPT.

Its blogpost also stipulates that ads will always be clearly labelled and separate from AI answers. Advertising will not influence AI outputs, it further claims.

Privacy questions

Citing its own “ads principles”, OpenAI said advertisers do not see ChatGPT users’ conversations with the AI, stressing that it does not sell customer data itself either.

Still, OpenAI’s privacy policy allows it to collect a wide array of data on users – such as digital identifiers, their location, their prompts and any files they upload – and further stipulates that it may share such information with other companies to meet “business operations needs”.

But the policy also specifies that OpenAI does not “sell” or “share” personal data to power behavioural advertising, as well as saying it does not process personal data to target ads or infer users’ characteristics.

Custom targeting

OpenAI’s ad tools do allow advertisers to target ads at “custom audiences”, though.

Its support page explains this is based on advertisers uploading “identifiers” of individuals they want their ads to reach – such as email addresses and phone numbers. ChatGPT advertisers can also geo-target their ads at a specific area.

OpenAI’s system does not support ad targeting based on people’s characteristics or interests – setting it apart from social media ad businesses like Meta’s – though a ChatGPT advertiser could create a custom audience to do that if they have behavioural data associated with the identifiers they upload.

OpenAI’s blogpost also notes that it plans to keep developing new ad “formats” and “measurement solutions” – so there’s no guarantee it will not offer more granular and intrusive forms of ad targeting natively in the future as it eyes an IPO.

Notably, back in 2024, founder Sam Altman described ads as a business model of “last resort” for AI.

-Euractiv