AI can’t sell ads without selling you out

For anyone who thinks AI will eventually “figure out” its revenue model once it reaches scale, let’s be clear about one thing:

Advertising is a permanently closed door.

It won’t just be difficult. It’s structurally incompatible with how AI works—and how users expect it to behave.

Advertising only works when it’s targeted, and it can only be targeted if the system has access to private signals—your identity, your intent, your behavior.

In traditional platforms:

Facebook uses your profile and clicks.
Google Search uses your queries.
YouTube uses your watch behavior.

But AI chat interfaces—especially under current privacy frameworks—cannot inspect your prompts, cannot fingerprint you and cannot track your interests across sessions without violating the core trust contract.

So even if someone wanted to insert ads, they’d either be:

Generic — like untargeted banner ads, which have terrible ROI, or

Surveillance-based — which breaks the very promise that AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Google’s Gemini have been making to users.

That’s not just a monetization challenge.

That’s a unscalable wall. Even at scale.