The Trade Desk is testing whether advertisers can build campaigns using Anthropic’s Claude.
Speaking at Marketecture Live in New York, CEO Jeff Green described a closed beta that lets a subset of advertisers create campaigns through a large language model. Details on what Claude actually does in the workflow are, for now, thin.
Green’s broader argument is that programmatic advertising is unusually compatible with automation. The system evaluates around 20 million ad opportunities every second, with roughly 10 milliseconds to decide—conditions that tend to reward anything that can operate at speed and scale.
This lines up with what he previewed on the company’s last earnings call: an agentic AI framework for partners expected in 2026. The wider category is already moving in that direction, with companies including Amazon opening parts of their ad tech stacks to AI-driven tools.
Green also used the moment to sketch out how he sees the economics shifting. He argued that generative AI companies, faced with high capital costs and pressure to generate revenue, may end up leaning on advertising.
On Amazon, he reiterated a more speculative position: that the company could eventually step back from running a demand-side platform for the open web due to antitrust risk. His reasoning is that, unlike Google, Amazon’s ads business sits alongside retail, cloud, and streaming—so regulatory scrutiny could have broader consequences.
He also pointed to retail media as an area of opportunity for programmatic platforms, while noting The Trade Desk is not yet operating product listing ads at scale. Asked about reports that agencies like Dentsu and WPP are moving away from OpenPath, Green declined to comment.
Read more at AdWeek.