ADWEEK AI, Tech & Money newsletter

Click here to view this email in your browser Welcome back to AI, Tech & Money. This is Trishla Ostwal, ADWEEK’s AI reporter, back in New York City after a week in London, where I moderated a panel at Semrush Spotlight. I also watched OpenAI make the case that the most effective method to sell ChatGPT to businesses in Europe is the old-fashioned way: in person, at events. Online, OpenAI is moving a lot faster. It said Wednesday that over 100,000 advertisers have now run campaigns on ChatGPT, and it’s expanding ChatGPT Ads into 26 more countries. But most of my week went to Meta, which has been in the ads game nearly two decades longer than OpenAI. I read its new business terms more times than I’d like to admit, and the short version is this: from Oct. 30, if Meta’s AI messes up your ad, that’s on you. Buyers I spoke with said Meta’s AI is already reworking their ads without asking. More on that in a minute. The new terms land in a busy week for Meta. A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found in September that Facebook misled users about how much control they had over their data. Meta is expected to appeal. The same day, Meta also reported $64.6 billion in third-quarter revenue, beating Wall Street’s estimate of about $63.3 billion. OpenAI wants a bigger number on the board, too. It’s in talks to raise about $30 billion at a valuation above $1.4 trillion, according to Reuters, up from the $852 billion it hit in March after a record $122 billion round. The timing is the tell. OpenAI wants to price the round before Anthropic’s expected mid-November IPO, when Anthropic’s disclosures will let investors compare the two businesses side by side. Anthropic's own number has been sliding: Investors at its Oct. 14 investor day discussed a valuation around $1.5 trillion, down from the roughly $2 trillion it had sought, after third-quarter growth slowed. TRISHLA OSTWAL; AI AND TECH REPORTER, ADWEEK trishla.ostwal@adweek.com | @trishlaostwal If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up here.   THE TOP LINE After previously targeting $3 billion in ad revenue for 2026, Netflix announced it's expected to hit $2.7 billion for the year. Cuttable, a startup that turns brands’ photo and video assets into AI ads across Meta, has raised $20 million in Series A. Kohl’s brings back Ellie Kemper for holiday ad campaign. New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay state $25 billion for misleading users about their data privacy. THE QUANT From January to July, news sites made up an average of 29.5% of ChatGPT’s cited sources in the U.K., according to Semrush’s AI Visibility Index shared with me; in the U.S., the number fell to 19.6%. ChatGPT had the highest news share of the four AI platforms each month, in both markets, ahead of Google’s Gemini, AI overviews and AI mode. Moreover, every platform leaned more heavily on news in the U.K. ChatGPT isn't necessarily favoring news sites by design, according to Semrush. I sat down with Eli Goodman, Semrush’s svp, product solutions, at its Spotlight event. He said the difference in citations across both the markets is tied to how people in each market consume news. In the U.S., news content is more blended with opinion, and trust in the media has fallen over the past decade or more compared with the U.K., he said. People in the U.K. consume more news, Goodman added, and because LLMs try to reason like humans, they end up mirroring that behavior. With news accounting for close to 30% of ChatGPT’s U.K. citations, Goodman said, PR has become an important part of how brands are viewed as sources.   DEEP LEARNING Advertisers Pull Meta Ads That Have Had Unwanted AI Glow-ups Meta’s AI has been editing advertisers’ ads on its platforms. Bookshop.org, the online bookseller, found out the hard way. In a post on Threads, the bookseller said that an automated account update from Meta opted it into a generative AI feature, which added an AI-generated illustra