After Anthropic took aim at OpenAI’s ad push in a new Super Bowl campaign on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a post on X calling the ads “funny” but “clearly dishonest.”

OpenAI said last month that it will begin testing ads with its free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the U.S., and Anthropic announced Wednesday that the company plans to keep its chatbot Claude ad-free.

Anthropic seized on the opportunity and took a not-so-subtle swipe at its rival with its Super Bowl campaign, which centers around Anthropic’s decision to keep ads out of Claude. Anthropic will air a 60-second pregame ad and a 30-second in-game ad that both feature the tag line, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Altman said that the commercials are “deceptive” and that OpenAI would “obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them.”

“We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that,” Altman wrote. “I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.”

A representative for Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers who left the company due to disagreements over its direction.

The two startups have been fierce rivals since Anthropic’s inception, and they’ve both raised billions of dollars of capital as they’ve jostled for users, enterprise customers and market share.

Altman said Wednesday that “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI” and that the company “serves an expensive product to rich people.” He said OpenAI also has more free users than Anthropic does, which means OpenAI has “a differently-shaped problem than they do.”

OpenAI said last month that ads within ChatGPT will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers and will not influence ChatGPT’s responses.

“As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything,” Altman wrote.

WATCH: OpenAI models could help power future versions of Amazon’s Alexa assistant: Source

Brazil’s telecommunications regulator threatened sanctions against Elon Musk’s satellite internet firm Starlink, as a public confrontation with the billionaire escalates over the country’s decision to block his social media company X.

Last week, Brazil’s supreme court ordered a nationwide suspension of X for not appointing a legal representative by a court-mandated deadline, in line with the country’s laws. That ruling was upheld Monday by a panel of federal supreme court justices.

Anatel, Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, has instructed internet providers to block access to X following the court order. Artur Coimbra, a commissioner at Anatel, told Reuters that Starlink is the only company that has told the regulator that it would not comply with the court decision.

In a separate interview with CNN Brasil on Monday, Coimbra said Anatel is looking into the potential noncompliance of Starlink and other network operators. The commissioner said there are a number of sanctions that could be imposed on a company if it does not comply with the court order to block X, including fines and the withdrawal of the license to do business in Brazil.

CNBC has reached out to Anatel and SpaceX, which runs Starlink, for comment.

Musk’s fight with Brazil stems back to April, when an X representative said that the company was forced by “court decisions to block certain popular accounts.” Shortly after, Musk said that restrictions were removed and urged users to download a virtual private network (VPN) to access X, in the case that the social network gets banned.

The conflict ramped up just as Brazil prepares for municipal elections in October. Under the country’s laws, social networks have to employ someone who can receive and consider government takedown notices about political misinformation.

X has no such employee in Brazil, after the company said it was removing all its staff from the country last month amid continuing tensions, triggering the latest legal confrontations.

The targeting of Starlink ramps up the dispute between Musk and Brazil, particularly stoking the billionaire’s conflict with Brazilian supreme court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who was responsible for the ban on X.

Starlink said last week on X that it received an order from Moraes that “freezes Starlink’s finances and prevents the company from conducting financial transactions” in the country.

Last week, X accused Moraes of threatening the social network’s legal representative with imprisonment. The company’s global government affairs team posted on X that the justice froze all of the representative’s bank accounts once she resigned.

Musk has repeatedly attacked Moraes branding him an “evil tyrant” and calling for his imprisonment. He has also characterized Brazil’s court ruling as censorship.

Brazil’s supreme court was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

Universal Music Group, the record label for top music artists including Taylor Swift and Drake, struck a new licensing agreement with TikTok, putting an end to a spat between the two companies.

In a statement Thursday, UMG said the licensing deal would lead to the return of its artists’ music to TikTok.

Earlier this year, TikTok pulled songs from artists signed to UMG after the two sides failed to agree on a new deal over content licensing, sparking a public spat.

Music by artists including Swift and Drake became unavailable on TikTok, which is owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance. Swift had her music restored on the platform on April 12.

UMG accused TikTok of bullying and intimidation in its contract negotiations and alleged that TikTok proposed paying its artists and songwriters “at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly situated major social platforms pay.” 

At the heart of the spat was the contention that TikTok allowed its platform to undermine artists’ intellectual property with unauthorized AI-generated songs. UMG claimed the social media platform was “flooded with AI-generated recordings.”

UMG and TikTok’s new deal aims to improve remuneration for songwriters and artists, provide promotional opportunities for their recordings, and introduce “industry-leading protections” when it comes to generative AI.

The fresh agreement, “focuses on the value of music, the primacy of human artistry and the welfare of the creative community,” said Lucian Grainge, chairman and CEO of UMG.

“We look forward to collaborating with the team at TikTok to further the interests of our artists and songwriters and drive innovation in fan engagement while advancing social music monetization.”

Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, said the platform is “committed to working together to drive value, discovery and promotion for all of UMG’s amazing artists and songwriters.”

TikTok and UMG said they would work to ensure AI development in the music industry protects artists and that they’re sufficiently paid for their material.

TikTok will also work with UMG to remove unauthorized AI-generated music from its platform, as well implement tools to improve artist and songwriter attribution.

Correction: The headline and text of this story have been amended to say that Taylor Swift’s music was restored on TikTok on April 12.

Buried on page 280 of Instacart’s IPO filing last week was a paragraph that caused a brouhaha between two companies that have nothing to do with grocery delivery.

One of Instacart’s board members is Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, a publicly traded company that helps businesses store and manage hefty workloads in the cloud. Slootman joined Instacart’s board in 2021 and, because of that relationship, the company has to disclose its business ties to Snowflake.

On first blush, the Instacart spending figure looks troubling for Snowflake.

Instacart said it “made payments to Snowflake” of $13 million in 2020, a number that increased to $28 million in 2021 and $51 million in 2022 for the company’s “cloud-based data warehousing services.” The 2023 numbers appear to show a reversal, with Instacart saying “we anticipate we will pay Snowflake approximately $15 million” for the full year.

That would be a frightening 71% drop in payments.

But Snowflake would later say that those figures don’t tell the real story, a fact that’s mostly backed up by a footnote even deeper in the prospectus.

In the meantime, chaos ensued.

Employees of Snowflake rival Databricks pounced. They took to social media to highlight the apparent decline in spending on Snowflake and to suggest that it was the result of Instacart moving workloads to Databricks infrastructure.

Snowflake staffers fired back, claiming the numbers were being taken out of context, and accused Databricks of consistently spinning the narrative that it was taking business from Snowflake.

Many of the posts on Reddit, LinkedIn and X, the site formerly known as Twitter, have since been deleted.

Instacart did some deleting of its own.

In May, the company published a blog post titled “How Instacart Ads Modularized Data Pipelines With Lakehouse Architecture and Spark.” The post, which described software underpinning Instacart’s ads infrastructure, included discussion of a migration to Databricks’ Lakehouse technology and the cost savings that followed.

However, that blog was taken down as questions began to swirl following the IPO filing. A reader looking for the post now ends up on a page that says, “You’ve landed in the 404 errorverse.” Databricks also took down a case study detailing Instacart’s use of its technology, though its website still has presentations from earlier this year on the topic.

Representatives from Instacart, Snowflake and Databricks declined to comment.

The controversy, which only came to light because Slootman is on Instacart’s board, has fanned the flames of a fierce rivalry between two companies battling it out in one of the hottest corners of technology, where cloud, data and artificial intelligence collide. It’s a conflict that’s made its way to social media plenty of times in the past, so much so that one Reddit user wrote a post a few months ago, titled “Databricks and Snowflake: Stop fighting on social.” A commenter responded, “Is this the pro-wrestling of data engineering?”

Snowflake went public in 2020, raising over $3 billion in the biggest U.S. IPO ever for a business software company. Even after last year’s market plunge, Snowflake has a market cap of over $50 billion.

Databricks is still private, but it’s one of the most richly valued venture-backed companies. Private investors valued the company at $38 billion in 2021, and Bloomberg reported last week that the company was in talks to raise funding at a $43 billion valuation.

To expand in AI, Snowflake recently acquired AI search engine Neeva for $185 million, while Databricks spent $1.3 billion on generative AI startup MosaicML.

That brings us back to Instacart.

While Databricks is picking up business from the grocery-delivery company, the footnote in Instacart’s S-1 spelling out the relationship with Snowflake shows that the spending decline in 2023 is not the most relevant figure.

Rather, when it comes to how Instacart accounts for operating expenses — its actual usage of Snowflake — that amount was $28 million in 2021, $28 million 2022, and then $11 million in the first half of 2023. That’s still a drop this year, but on an annualized basis it would be around 21% instead of 71%.

To add to the confusion, the footnote under “Related Party Transactions” didn’t name Slootman or Snowflake, referring only to a “an executive officer of a software vendor.” 

With the online chatter picking up, Snowflake wanted to clear up the picture, at least from its point of view. On Wednesday, the company published a four-paragraph blog post titled, “Snowflake and Instacart: The Facts.”

“In the past few days, the scope and trajectory of Instacart’s use of Snowflake has been misrepresented by some on social media,” the post begins. Nowhere is Databricks mentioned in the post, a consistent theme for Snowflake, which doesn’t name Databricks as a competitor in its financial filings.

Snowflake went on to say that it was working with Instacart to “optimize for efficiency,” a phrase that implies doing more with less, and that its technology is “used extensively by nearly every team within Instacart, including the catalog team, machine learning, ads, shoppers, retailers, customers, and logistics organizations.”

The post then highlights the usage figures from the filing footnote and claims that, “In some social media posts, payment schedules have been incorrectly conflated with actual usage to suggest a large decline in spending — this is not the case.”

In other words, if there’s a decline in spending, it’s not because we’re losing business to an unnamed company.

The good news for Snowflake is that the IPO process calls for multiple prospectus updates. Instacart, which is trying to unlock a tech IPO market that’s been largely frozen for 20 months, will get a chance to clear up the matter with investors very soon.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: Instacart files for IPO under ‘CART’ on Nasdaq