OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT Ads to 31 European countries from 24 August 2026, the company confirmed on 18 August. The expansion covers all 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, the rest of the European Economic Area. The UK already had ChatGPT Ads before this rollout, which puts OpenAI’s European footprint at 32 countries once the new markets switch on. The rollout lands the same week OpenAI paused AI model training after a Hugging Face security breach, a reminder of how much technical and commercial risk the company is managing at once.
The rollout
The 27 EU states covered are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.
Ads only appear to users on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscribers see none, and OpenAI says opting out of ad personalization changes which ads a user sees, not whether they see any. The product launched first in the US in February 2026, then reached Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the UK over the following months. Dave Dugan, OpenAI’s VP of Ads, put the pitch to advertisers this way:
People come to ChatGPT with goals. In the attention economy, brands have to be interesting; in the intelligence economy, they have to be useful.
OpenAI puts ChatGPT’s weekly active users at 900 million, with about a fifth of queries showing direct commercial intent, the base its ad business is built on.
Setting up a campaign
Access runs three ways for now: OpenAI’s own Ads Solutions team, agency partners, or approved technology partners. A self-service Ads Manager is due later this summer for advertisers who want to run campaigns themselves.
The workflow at ads.openai.com breaks into three steps. First, campaign creation: set a budget and pick a goal, CPM, CPC or conversion-optimised bidding. Second, ad details: upload creative in bulk or build ads directly in the tool, with geo-targeting and custom audiences layered on top. Third, launch and optimise: track impressions, clicks and conversions through an analytics dashboard, OpenAI’s own pixel, or a Conversions API and third-party measurement integrations. New advertisers get $500 in ad credit after spending their first $500. Ads are labelled and kept visually distinct from ChatGPT’s own answers.
Where gambling stands
None of this opens a door for gambling operators. OpenAI’s advertising policy states plainly: “Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed.” That rules out casino and betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms offering cash prizes, across every one of the 32 European markets and every other country on OpenAI’s list.
There is one narrow exception. Casino ads can run when they promote lodging, travel or entertainment where gambling itself isn’t the pitch, a hotel stay at a casino resort, for instance. Digital games with no real-money wagering are also fine. Anything that involves staking money on an outcome is not.
No separate lane for B2B
The policy draws no line between advertising aimed at consumers and advertising aimed at other businesses. A sportsbook’s free-bet promotion and a B2B platform provider’s pitch to an operator fall under the same wagering-related restriction the moment the creative touches gambling itself. Gambling sits alongside adult content, alcohol and tobacco in OpenAI’s most restrictive tier, categories the company says are generally kept off the platform rather than approved with conditions. That is a stricter posture than the one applied to financial services, health and legal advertising, which face tighter manual review and proof-of-licensing checks but do have a conditional path to approval. Gambling, for now, has none.
A door that may open later
OpenAI has already loosened restrictions in other ad categories twice this year, in April and July, and its ad policy carries the caveat that the restricted list “may evolve as the program develops.” Industry analysts reading that pattern point to a possible future split between licensed operators in regulated markets, the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand among them, and unregulated offshore sites, with only the former eventually offered a conditional route. Offers with no wagering requirements are seen as more likely to clear automated and human review than bonuses loaded with terms and game restrictions, if and when the category opens at all. As with Anthropic’s move to watermark Claude-generated text, AI platforms are still drawing the line between consumer protection and product growth, a question gambling ad policy sits squarely inside.
For now, the practical reality for iGaming marketers is unchanged by the European launch: ChatGPT Ads is one more major ad surface, alongside search and social, where gambling brands cannot buy space, whichever side of the operator-supplier line they sit on. Whether that changes tracks the same question OpenAI is still working through for financial services and health advertising: how to verify a licensed, compliant offer at the speed an AI ad review runs.
Source: OpenAI
