MUMBAI: The ad game is getting a little less open-ended for OpenAI, with the company reportedly tightening ChatGPT’s advertising rules to keep rival image and audio-generation products off its platform.
According to media reports, OpenAI has told advertising agencies that advertisements for individual image- and audio-generation services competing with its own capabilities will no longer be accepted on ChatGPT. The change has not been publicly announced by OpenAI and does not currently appear as an explicit banned category in its published advertising policy.
Adobe is among the advertisers affected. Doug Wyatt, senior director of Americas Media at Adobe, said OpenAI had notified advertising partners that image- and audio-generation products would no longer be accepted for advertising. Adobe had participated in OpenAI’s advertising pilot earlier this year, promoting Acrobat Studio and Adobe Firefly, its AI-powered image-generation tool.
The reported restriction appears to target the product category rather than advertisers themselves. That means companies such as Adobe are not necessarily shut out of ChatGPT advertising altogether. Video-generation products, for instance, are reportedly still permitted.
OpenAI’s current advertising policy lists digital products and education among categories supported during the early stages of the programme, while reserving the right to reject ad content or website links for any reason. All campaigns remain subject to OpenAI approval.
The timing is notable. OpenAI is expanding its own footprint in the very categories now facing tighter advertising access. The company recently introduced ChatGPT Images 2.5, while ChatGPT Live, its voice capability, launched in July. What was once a straightforward advertising category is therefore increasingly sitting next door to OpenAI’s own product shelf.
The reported change comes as ChatGPT Ads itself gathers pace. On August 31, OpenAI said the business had crossed a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate in less than 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers using the platform. It has also expanded direct ad buying through Ads Manager across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
OpenAI began testing ChatGPT ads in the US in February, initially for users on its Free and Go plans. The programme has since expanded internationally to 31 European markets, adding advertising to a business model that also includes consumer subscriptions, enterprise services and usage-based APIs.
There may be another gate closing, too. The Information reported that ChatGPT had stopped providing outbound links for some action-oriented queries involving image editors and image generators. OpenAI has not announced this as a general platform-wide policy, so that claim remains part of the report rather than a confirmed rule.
For AI software companies, the issue is bigger than one advertising category. ChatGPT is increasingly both a place where users discover AI tools and a platform offering many of those capabilities itself. If the reported restriction holds or spreads to other overlapping categories, advertisers may find that the closer their product gets to OpenAI’s own toolkit, the harder it becomes to buy a ticket to the ChatGPT ad space.