OpenAI plans to display personalised ads within ChatGPT for free and Go plan users, with options to opt in or out, marking a significant shift towards monetisation while emphasising user privacy controls.
OpenAI is preparing to place advertisements inside ChatGPT for users on its Free and Go plans, with the first placements shaped by the topic of the conversation, rough location and device type rather than by long-term chat history. The move marks a significant shift for a product that has so far been marketed largely around subscription access and utility, and it comes with a clear division between ad-supported and paid tiers.
According to Help Net Security, users will be asked to opt in before personalised advertising begins. If they agree, OpenAI says the system can take account of in-product activity, including ads a user has interacted with and context from conversations, with a setting available to change that choice later. If they decline, ad selection remains limited to the current topic and the same narrow set of signals. OpenAI also says ads will be clearly labelled and set apart from model responses, and that advertisers will receive only aggregate performance data such as total views or clicks.
The company says ads will not change the answers ChatGPT gives and that personal chats, memories and other account details will not be shared with advertisers. That distinction matters because OpenAI has already been tightening controls elsewhere in the product. In recent months it introduced Lockdown Mode for users who want stronger protection against prompt injection attacks and other advanced threats, and it also released an open-weight Privacy Filter model to detect and redact personally identifiable information.
OpenAI has also been expanding account security with passkeys and hardware security keys, while removing password-based recovery paths that can be exploited in phishing attacks. Taken together, those moves suggest a broader effort to build trust around a product that is becoming more commercially complex. The new privacy-policy language is meant to spell out how advertising will work, what data it can use and where the boundaries remain.
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