The Biggest Star of the Super Bowl Isn’t an Athlete—or Bad Bunny

February 8, 2026

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Remember all those ads about artificial intelligence during last year’s Super Bowl? Probably not—because even those of us who follow this stuff for a living can barely recall the details of Big Tech’s ad blitz amid the big game, despite the collective tens of millions of dollars that companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Google poured in. So for Super Bowl LX, the fake-brain industry is working to make an impression on our real brains by turning to the cryptocurrency bubble’s onetime game plan—and bringing in all your favorite celebrities.

Former crypto shills Spike Lee and Marshawn Lynch are in the lineup, ready to show off their brand-new Meta Oakleys and add a sporty imprimatur to the wearable A.I. gadget that CEO Mark “Masculine Energy” Zuckerberg is now branding as “Athletic Intelligence.” Benson Boone and Ben Stiller make up the unlikely duo leading a retro-aesthetic dance-off for Instacart’s “Bananas,” nodding to the yellow fruit’s meme status among extremely online A.I. enthusiasts (and to the delivery app’s own A.I. ventures). Amazon’s Ring, which has raised some eyebrows thanks to its recent incorporation of facial recognition software, is attempting a PR turnaround by inserting its Shark Tank–infamous founder and his dog straight into this year’s ad, promoting Ring A.I.’s purported ability to find lost pets. (Notably, Amazon also has a promo for its Alexa+ voice assistant, starring Chris Hemsworth.) The automated expense management platform Ramp is deploying The Office’s beloved accountant Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner) as a human stand-in for paperclip maximization, with the app cloning Kevin enough times to have him take over the entire office space.

Plus, YouTube titan MrBeast has been teasing his first-ever gametime ad, on behalf of Salesforce. Details are still vague, but it appears Slack’s parent company will highlight Beast Industries’ noted excitement over the workplace app’s A.I. agents.

There’s little doubt that Sunday will herald the A.I. Super Bowl, where millions of Americans will get blitzed with constant reminders of the robot arms race whenever the cameras tune away from the Seahawks–Patriots matchup or the Bad Bunny halftime show. It obviously isn’t the first Super Bowl with A.I.-themed ads. It will, however, be the first with A.I. taking center stage—a revealing gametime moment for the tech as it confronts investor anxiety, broader fatigue, and fears of impending economic crisis.

While not every ad is hawking some form of A.I., plenty will be incorporating its use, with and without celebrities. Serena Williams is appearing on behalf of the health care platform Ro, which deploys A.I. in everything from patient conversations to its newest ad’s pre-production process. Xfinity’s first-ever Big Game bid utilizes de-aging software to bring Jurassic Park stars Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill back to the ’90s. If that isn’t enough evidence that irony’s as dead as the dinosaurs, flip to Anthropic’s four ads about how its much-hyped Claude bots will never, well, incorporate ads—taking a clear shot at OpenAI, whose executives are not happy about it.

The real twist is that consumers also seem to loathe this marketing ploy. 2025’s A.I. ad spend didn’t get viewers more excited about the tech. Consumers surveyed this month by Ad Age and Harris feel mostly negative about the prospect of more A.I. generations on the Super Bowl broadcast. The YouTube comments for Taika Waititi’s Pepsi spot express near-universal relief that, unlike Coca-Cola, this soft-drink company doesn’t go the generated-promotion route. (Svedka, meanwhile, has employed the same A.I. firm behind the hated Coke ad for its own bowl spot—and it’s turned off YouTube comments.) OpenAI is well aware that its big Super Bowl debut flopped last year, and the ChatGPT-maker was already puzzling through how to make this round’s minutelong spot more appealing before Anthropic came in hot with its diss.

The sheer saturation of new A.I. gambits, added to the mismatch with consumer priorities, give this year’s NFL showcase the sector-specific recession-indicator vibes that have defined Super Bowls of the past. 2022 was a pride-cometh-before-the-fall event for the cryptocurrency bubble, which collapsed in such spectacular fashion later that year—thanks largely to Super Bowl ad client Sam Bankman-Fried—that none of its major brands have ever returned to the broadcast. (By the way, despite the Trump administration’s corrupt bargains with crypto execs, the coins themselves are once again crashing, hard.) Mortgage lender Ameriquest was as conspicuous a presence in the mid-2000s Super Bowls as it was an absence in the later aughts, having folded in 2007 when the risky subprime loans it specialized in helped kick off the financial crisis. And then there were all those bowl-game commercials for websites like Pets.com and Computer.com in 2000, when the dot-com rush brought attention to a slew of digital startups that went bust with the bubble.

Does this Super Bowl’s record-breaking A.I. ad splurge also portend a coming pop? Look at the business environment: The biggest names in the industry are swapping unimaginable stacks of cash exclusively with one another. One firm’s stock price depends on another firm’s projections, which depend on another contractor’s successes. Necessary infrastructure is meeting resistance, and all-around investment in these projects is riskier than ever. And yet, the sector is still willing to break the bank for the Super Bowl—even though, time and again, we’ve already seen how this particular game plays out.