OpenAI launched advertising in ChatGPT "so that all of humanity could benefit from AGI" — or so Samantha Jacobson, the company's vice president of monetization partnerships, told an Advertising Week New York panel.

Jacobson made the claim during a question about privacy and consumer trust, according to Digiday's coverage of the session. Her framing of the ad-funded bargain closely resembles the pitches that came before it from television and social platforms: ads subsidize access for users who cannot or will not pay.

Why does OpenAI say it needs ads in ChatGPT?

Jacobson's argument rests on economics. Ads cover the cost of serving users who use ChatGPT for free, since "not everyone's going to be able to" pay for a subscription, she said.

On the same stage sat Derek Michael, ad tech boss at Skydance, the owner of Paramount. Jacobson drew a direct comparison to Paramount's subscription tiers, which are priced by how many ads a viewer will tolerate. A cheaper plan carries more ad load; an ad-free plan costs more.

The comparison is revealing but imperfect. A pre-roll ad costs a Paramount viewer a few minutes of attention. ChatGPT's ads, by contrast, are matched to what a user is actually asking — and, unless personalization is switched off, to signals from their wider use of the product.

What makes ChatGPT ads different from streaming ads?

The difference is the data. A streaming service knows what someone watched. ChatGPT knows what someone is thinking about, searching for and working on, in real time, in their own words.

That creates a sharper version of a bargain consumers have seen before. People raised on the ad-funded internet learned that when they do not pay for a product, they become the product. OpenAI now has to sell that same bargain — but with far more intimate signals attached — to a user base that arrived expecting an assistant, not an ad inventory.

How does OpenAI plan to keep user trust?

Jacobson leaned hard on reassurance. "Consumer trust is the single most important thing," she said, adding that OpenAI would protect it "even if it's at the expense or revenue or other partnership opportunities."

The pledge is notable for what it concedes: that the company sees a real tension between monetization and trust, and that it expects to walk away from revenue at times to manage it. Marketers watching the panel heard an implicit warning that OpenAI will constrain ad formats, targeting or partnerships if trust comes under pressure.

For brands, the stakes are straightforward. ChatGPT's ad slots offer reach into a product used like a search engine, an assistant and a writing tool at once. But the same context that makes the inventory valuable — genuine user intent — makes any misstep with creative, relevance or data handling unusually visible to the people seeing the ads.

Jacobson's appearance signals how OpenAI wants the market to read its advertising push: not as a grab for ad dollars, but as the subsidy mechanism that lets free access survive while the company pursues AGI. Whether users accept that framing, given the personalization involved, will determine how much of the inventory marketers can safely use.