Now you’re hallucinating – OpenAI denies there are ads on ChatGPT, after users complain about seeing them

OpenAI insists it is not running ads inside ChatGPT.

However, after multiple paying users reported seeing what looked like promotions for Target and Peloton, the company has been forced to clarify what, exactly, is happening.

Over the weekend, senior executives from OpenAI responded to screenshots posted on X by ChatGPT subscribers claiming they had seen in-chat prompts urging them to ‘shop at Target’.

I'm in ChatGPT (paid Plus subscription), asking about Windows BitLocker

and it's F-ing showing me ADS TO SHOP AT TARGET.

Yeah, screw this. Lose all your users. pic.twitter.com/2Z5AG8pnlJ

— Benjamin De Kraker (@BenjaminDEKR) December 3, 2025

ChatGPT head Nick Turley rejected the idea that OpenAI had begun experimenting with advertising.

“I’m seeing lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT. There are no live tests for ads – any screenshots you’ve seen are either not real or not ads,” Turley said on X.

“If we do pursue ads, we’ll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.”

I'm seeing lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT. There are no live tests for ads – any screenshots you’ve seen are either not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we’ll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.

— Nick Turley (@nickaturley) December 6, 2025

OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen acknowledged the company had mishandled the experience.

“I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care, and we fell short,” Chen said.

He said OpenAI had now “turned off this kind of suggestion” while it works to improve the model’s precision, and flagged the introduction of user controls to “dial this down or off” entirely.

OpenAI maintains the prompts users saw were not advertisements but recommendations tied to its ChatGPT app platform, launched in October. These were meant to showcase third-party apps and integrations, with “no financial component” involved.

But that distinction raised eyebrows among frustrated subscribers. As one user responded, “Bruhhh… Don’t insult your paying users”.

And heeeeere we go.

OpenAI employees are now claiming that a banner (in an unrelated chat) asking the user to "shop for groceries at Target"

"isn't an ad."
Bruhhh… Don't insult your paying users. https://t.co/Kw7tM3BrIV pic.twitter.com/31g8F5eOSd

— Benjamin De Kraker (@BenjaminDEKR) December 3, 2025

OpenAI’s shopping feature

The incident follows months of major product updates that have increasingly blurred the boundary between organic recommendations and commercial activity inside ChatGPT.

In September, OpenAI unveiled Instant Checkout in partnership with Stripe, allowing US users to buy products from Etsy entirely within ChatGPT.

A month later, it introduced Pulse, a dashboard-style feed of personalised cards that can surface news, reminders and prompts.

And just a couple of weeks ago, OpenAI rolled out Shopping Research, a feature that turns ChatGPT product discovery into a guided experience spanning specs, comparisons, retailer links, and availability data.

OpenAI stresses that Shopping Research results are “organic and based on publicly available retail sites”, with retailers required to allowlist the ChatGPT crawler in order to appear. But user behaviour and model outputs already resemble an early version of an AI-first commerce platform — one that sits directly between consumers and retailers.

That context is why this ad controversy has struck such a nerve. As ChatGPT’s interface absorbs more real-world commerce functions, users are struggling to distinguish between features OpenAI calls “integrations” and what feel like paid placements.

The suggestions that prompted this weekend’s backlash appeared in the same UI layer as previous shopping features, making them difficult to interpret as anything other than promotions.

As I previously theorised in Neural Notes, ChatGPT’s updates position it closer to a Google Ads-style environment, where product discovery, recommendations, and purchasing converge inside a single conversational interface.

OpenAI has never denied that advertising is on the roadmap. In fact, former Instacart and Facebook executive Fidji Simo was widely expected to help build the company’s commercial business after joining as CEO of Applications.

But according to a report by The Wall Street Journal last week, CEO Sam Altman recently issued a “code red” internally after the positive reception to Google’s Gemini 3, redirecting resources toward core ChatGPT quality and postponing other product work, including ads.

That doesn’t eliminate the underlying strategy. It simply delays it. And given the scale of ChatGPT’s user base, the incentives are unlikely to disappear.

The bigger issue for now is trust. Conversational AI interfaces inherently collapse the distinction between answers and recommendations. When suggestions appear inside the same chat window used for everyday queries, users have no visual boundary between what is organic and what may become commercial.

That ambiguity is at the heart of this week’s backlash: OpenAI said the suggestions weren’t ads, but users felt like they were. That perception gap matters, particularly when the company is releasing so many shopping-based features on the platform.

OpenAI can insist there are no ads today, but everything about the platform’s trajectory tells us that they’re coming.

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