The AI industry is about to relearn every lesson of the ad blocking wars

Maybe money does not explain everything, but it explains a lot.

Goldman Sachs estimates the AI build-out will require roughly $7.6 trillion in capital over the next five years across compute, data centers and power.

It’s unlikely that subscriptions alone will cover the bill, which is why ads are coming to AI.

OpenAI started rolling out ads in some ChatGPT tiers this year and forecasts $2.5 billion in ad revenue in 2026 and $100 billion by 2030.

At an ad tech event this summer, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser dropped the hedging and said the company is "clearly in the advertising business now." Perplexity, on the other hand, shut down its ad business entirely over user trust.

Similar products, same opportunity, opposite conclusions.

This conflict is not new and the open web fought this battle 15 years ago, when ad blocking became mainstream.

Now, the AI industry is on track to repeat every mistake of the so-called ad blocking wars, unless it studies them instead.

Lesson one: users revolt faster than big platforms think When ad formats became more intrusive - because again, money! - the industry assumed users would just accept a bad experience.

Instead, users fought back and installed software to get rid of aggressive online ads.

In what technology commentator Doc Searls called “the biggest boycott in world history”, ad blocking went from being a niche tool to a mainstream product.

And we see the same dynamic playing out again.

Within weeks of sponsored ads appearing in ChatGPT, purpose-built extensions popped up to specifically block ads there.

Existing ad blocking tools made sure to block those ads as well.