For years, Sam Altman said he hated ads, calling them “last resort.” Yet, prediction markets are betting he won't have a choice.
What Happened: On Polymarket, traders are currently pricing in a 37% chance that OpenAI implements ads on ChatGPT before March 31. Could this be a warning flare about the health of the AI bubble?
With OpenAI's annual burn rate reportedly exceeding $17 billion this year, the company is facing a harsh reality: subscription revenue alone will not be enough to feed the compute-hungry models like o3 and GPT-5.
In 2025, OpenAI made a series of deals that increasingly tied it to the broader market, effectively turning itself into the engine room of the S&P 500.
In September, Open AI signed a $300 billion cloud computing contract with Oracle Corp (NASDAQ:ORCL).
That same month, Open AI announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA), involving up to $100 billion in hardware investment.
By late 2025, the partnership was restructured, cementing Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ:MSFT) stake at roughly $135 billion.
All of these companies saw an increase in their stock prices after the deals were announced. If OpenAI’s revenue model falters, the shockwaves travel instantly to the balance sheets of the world’s most valuable companies.
OpenAI's closest competitor, Google's (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Gemini, is already eating into ChatGPT’s market share. Unlike OpenAI, Google has an almost infinite runway funded by search revenue.
Gemini-3-Pro currently ranks #1 on LM Arena's text leaderboard.
Why It Matters: If OpenAI is forced to clumsily shoehorn ads into ChatGPT to survive, it risks driving users straight into the arms of its rival.
Investors with significant AI exposure should take note that OpenAI is the load-bearing pillar of the S&P 500's current valuation.
If OpenAI’s forced pivot to ads does not go well, it's a public admission that AI might become a commodity product, sold at close to breakeven.
With so much of last year’s stock market gains being attributed to the AI play, this could spook the broader market.
What’s Next: This instability is happening against a fragile economic backdrop.
Polymarket traders currently price the odds of a U.S. recession in 2026 at ~22%.
If the AI bubble pops while the economy softens, 2026 could see a violent correction.
Image: Shutterstock
