The AI Bowl: How Tech Scored Big on the Biggest Stage

The game within the game: each year, the Super Bowl features two important and culture-shaking games—the one on the field and the commercials aired between plays. Both come with sky-high costs, strong competition, and a winner that everyone remembers.

The 2026 Super Bowl LX was one of the most watched broadcasts in U.S. history, drawing nearly 125 million viewers across multiple channels, according to Nielsen. And advertisers paid a hefty premium for this captive audience to the tune of $10 million for a 30‑second prime spot. With $10 million on the line just for the airtime, brands face a critical choice: punt and play it safe, or go for the big play?

In 2026, this choice was further complicated by artificial intelligence. From legacy tech giants to unexpected consumer brands, advertisers didn’t just talk about AI, they built campaigns around it, leveraged it to create content, and in some cases placed it at the center of their storytelling. The result? An unprecedented “AI Bowl” that is likely to reshape advertising for years to come.

The First: Svedka’s “Shake Your Bots Off”

If one ad defined this year’s AI moment, it’s Svedka’s Super Bowl debut. The vodka brand making its very first Big Game appearance dropped what it touts as the first “primarily” AI-generated national Super Bowl commercial in history. The 30-second spot, titled “Shake Your Bots Off,” brings back Svedka’s old robot mascot Fembot after a 12-year hiatus, alongside her new companion Brobot, at a human party.

According to Svedka’s parent company Sazerac, it took roughly four months to reconstruct Fembot and train the AI to replicate facial expressions and body movements. Interestingly, the production was handled by Silverside A, the same creators of the controversial Coca-Cola holiday commercials that sparked backlash in 2025. Svedka framed AI as ‘an animation tool’ with human art direction behind every frame, but the output tells a different story. The ghostly AI-generated crowd, the odd smoothness of the robots’ appearance and movement, and the slightly off physical proportions are the kinds of details that make viewers uncomfortable. Four months of production and a multimillion-dollar budget, and people were still talking about the AI instead of the vodka.

Anthropic vs. OpenAI: The Shade Heard Round the Internet

If Svedka was the most-talked-about production choice, Anthropic’s Super Bowl debut was the most strategically petty, in the best way possible.

Rather than explain what Anthropic’s AI solution, Claude, actually does, the company used its airtime to blast competitor OpenAI’s announced plan to introduce ads to its AI platform, ChatGPT. Anthropic’s commercial tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” The spot imagines a future where your helpful AI assistant starts hawking “Step Boost Maxx” between answering questions. It landed—and not just with audiences. The ad caught the attention of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who fired back on X, turning a product launch into a cultural moment.

From a brand positioning standpoint, this is a classic strategy: define yourself against the competitor, rather than describe your own features. On a stage where 125 million people are watching, the bold bet paid dividends.

But the ad raises a bigger question worth sitting with: what happens to trust when the tool you rely on starts surfacing paid promotions?

We’ve been here before. Google built a search engine, then quietly surrounded the results with ads. Social media platforms gave us connection, then sold our attention to the highest bidder. In both cases, users eventually realized they had become the product, not just the customer. AI assistants are following a familiar path, and the stakes may be even higher. These tools don’t just serve you content; they answer your questions, know your habits, and increasingly make decisions on your behalf. When ads enter that relationship, the line between helpful and manipulative gets very blurry, very fast.

The Rest of the Field Showed Up Too

Beyond those two headliners, the AI presence at Super Bowl LX was impossible to miss. AI companies collectively outspent what crypto firms from the infamous 2022 “Crypto Bowl” by more than double—a sign of just how much the industry was pushing for this moment.

The individual efforts were just as telling. Amazon used the stage to lean into AI anxiety with a darkly comedic spot featuring Chris Hemsworth alongside an Alexa+ that seems a little too comfortable making its own decisions. Meta went the opposite direction with pure excitement, high energy, and a campaign for its Oakley AI glasses that earned some of the night’s strongest audience sentiment. Two very different reads on where consumers are with AI right now.

Then there was the wildcard. A mysterious 30-second spot ran for a domain called ai.com, recently acquired for $70 million by the founder of Crypto.com. The ad said almost nothing, just the idea that “AGI is coming…get your @handle now,” and yet it generated more than nine times the consumer engagement of the median Super Bowl ad, topped the night’s performance rankings, and promptly crashed its own website from the surge of traffic. Sometimes the most powerful message is the one that leaves the most unsaid.

The Bigger Picture

What Super Bowl LX made clear is that AI is no longer a novelty in advertising—it’s infrastructure. The Svedka ad didn’t fail because AI was used to make it. It sparked conversation because the tool became the headline instead of the idea, and the unnatural aesthetic raised questions that no campaign brief can fully cover. Meanwhile, Anthropic turned a product launch into a culture war, and a mysterious domain nobody had heard of crashed its own website from the traffic surge it generated in 30 seconds.

Whether you're excited or skeptical, one thing is certain: AI is no longer something happening in the background. It's on the biggest stage in American television, spending tens of millions of dollars to introduce itself to your living room. The conversation about how we use it, who profits from it, and what we give up in the process is just getting started.