This comes hot on the heels of an engineer discovering ad code in the Android app — which left a lot of people cautious of such inserts.
It happened to enough people to notice, along with this writer, but it has since been turned off, says Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI:
I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care, and we fell short.
We’ve turned off this kind of suggestion while we improve the model’s precision. We’re also looking at better controls so you can dial this down or off if you don’t find it helpful.
— Mark Chen (@markchen90) December 5, 2025
After a short while, Nick Turley, the ChatGPT head at OpenAI, also chimed in, vehemently denying that they are actually putting ads into ChatGPT:
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
This means that a) the Target spots were not intended as ads, but suggestions, and b) they’ve now turned it off in users’ feeds.
Also, Turley notes that if and when ads do come, they will be designed to respect the trust that users put in ChatGPT.
All ad efforts are currently on hold at OpenAI, after Sam Altman declared a Code Red to work on a Gemini 3-beating model.
Read more: Discussion on r/ChatGPT.