Amazon Enables Advertisers to Access ChatGPT Ads as OpenAI Bars Competing AI Brands

Amazon has begun letting its advertising clients place ads inside OpenAI's ChatGPT, opening a new inventory channel just as OpenAI's chatbot advertising business crosses billion in annualized revenue run rate. The rollout is a pilot limited to select US advertisers, with Delta Vacations named as one of the first travel brands testing the format. Ads built and managed through Amazon's demand-side platform appear as text or image units beneath ChatGPT's conversational responses, with OpenAI's own ad system controlling final placement and delivery.

The expansion arrives alongside a separate, less public move: OpenAI has quietly tightened what advertisers can promote inside ChatGPT, according to a report from The Information. The restriction is narrower than a blanket ban on rival AI brands: it targets standalone image- and audio-generation tools specifically, while ads for video-generation products remain permitted. Adobe, which had been promoting its Firefly image generator and Acrobat Studio through ChatGPT's ad pilot, is the company named as directly affected. Doug Wyatt, Adobe's senior director for Americas media, said the policy carves out image and audio tools while leaving other software categories untouched.

The two moves point in the same direction: OpenAI wants to grow ad revenue without handing its own audience to close AI rivals. ChatGPT draws roughly 900 million weekly active users as of OpenAI's February count, and ad serving per user climbed sharply ahead of the Amazon deal, with market-tracking firm Sensor Tower measuring a 163% jump in ads served per user per hour in the US between April and August. Amazon was already OpenAI's top retail advertiser over that same stretch, ahead of earlier ChatGPT ad partners Target and Albertsons, making the new DSP integration a formalization of a relationship that was already Amazon's largest inside ChatGPT rather than a first entry.

The pairing is notable given Amazon's own history: the company had previously restricted outside AI assistants from its retail ecosystem while building competing AI shopping tools of its own, so this partnership is an exception carved out specifically for OpenAI. OpenAI is reportedly targeting.4 billion in annual ad sales, a goal that could explain why it is opening the door wider to a partner like Amazon while closing it on categories, like image and audio generation, where OpenAI now competes directly. Investors could watch advertiser adoption in the pilot, any expansion beyond the US, and whether excluded firms like Adobe shift ad spend elsewhere; neither company's ad revenue growth is assured to match these early projections.