Some unobfuscated internal notes in the latest version of the Android ChatGPT app indicate the company is internally testing third-party ads and could be ready for a rollout by the first or second quarter of 2026, as sharp-eyed hackers observed. The leak was seemingly confirmed several days later as users of ChatGPT’s subscription services noticed what appeared to be low-key public ad testing, with the LLM suggesting products mid-conversation that had no direct prior relevance to the ongoing chat.
There is some debate over whether what subscribers are presently seeing constitute actual ads, but the leak from the Android app is much more clear with internal markers referring to APIs such as “search ads carousel” and “ad target type.” ChatGPT is somewhat late to the ad party, with Perplexity the first of the major LLMs to implement them roughly a year ago and Google and Microsoft both confirmed to be in varying stages of working them into their products. But their entry will very likely be the most disruptive to the targeted advertising landscape, given it has the largest user base and collects more information on users than the traditional search products of its main rivals.
Paying subscribers upset by sudden seeming appearance of ChatGPT ads
Though obvious revenue needs have made it seem to be an eventuality, up until the past week there have not been any ChatGPT ads implemented. Premium subscribers pay for access to a broader range of features and tools as well as higher daily usage limits, while free users have a much more limited but also ad-free experience. It has also moved in the direction of integrating direct shopping features, though these remain optional. CEO Sam Altman has previously said that he does not like ads as a revenue model and would consider them a “last resort” for the company, but OpenAI has also been losing tens of billions of dollars annually as massive operating costs far outpace what it brings in from subscribers.
The first development in this story, the Android app leak, indicates that plans for ChatGPT ads are at least in the works. The 1.2025.329 beta version’s code lists references to over a dozen APIs that appear to explicitly be about serving ads; titles include “AdsDebugInfo,” “AdTarget,” “BazaarContentWrapper” and “EncodedAdData” among others. The names suggest that the planned ads will be tied to the search experience, though this certainly does not exclude the possibility of them appearing in other places and products.
The second element is the sudden appearance of what seem to be ads in the chats of paying subscribers, which caused numerous complaints on social media. Some users posted screenshots of ads for Peloton fitness classes appearing during Pro subscription chats unrelated to the product. But other users suggested these might be app connection suggestions, a feature that has been present in the LLM for some time now, that ended up looking like ChatGPT ads. The company has yet to issue an official statement as of this writing, but some of its employees individually took to social media to back up the idea that this is a limited preview testing of its Apps SDK recommendations that only some users might encounter and that these instances are not monetized.
ChatGPT ads could move the market away from search
An official rollout of ChatGPT ads is not likely in the immediate future, however, as Altman just recently announced a “code red” pause on anything not related to speed and quality of answering questions in response to Google’s recent upgrades to Gemini. That explicitly means a pause on all OpenAI’s advertising initiatives, including its AI shopping agents and “Pulse” personal assistant.
ChatGPT ads will likely be OpenAI’s main source of income once they are in place, however. The LLM has become the “name brand” of all-knowing AI chatbots and is closing in on 1 billion active users per week, likely to hit that number sometime in 2026 if its current pace of growth continues. At present about 800 million regular users send about 2.5 billion prompts per day, many of which have the sort of immediately actionable information that targeted advertising dreams about. While search ads often have to piece together intent from clues and signals, LLM users just tell the system in their own words and often add multiple rounds of follow-up information.
Whatever the true plan is, OpenAI needs to do something in a hurry to defray operating costs that are approaching $1 million per day. While investors are still lined up to support the project, over a longer-term period of the next several years there has been speculation that financial pressures will ultimately lead the company to sell to a better-resourced rival such as Microsoft (which it already has an AI business relationship with).
