Anthropic's newest ad backfires as critics question AI safety messaging and cemetery imagery

Anthropic's newest ad is creeping people out

Anthropic is known for its creative marketing, but the AI company may have been a little bit too creative when it conjured up its most recent advertisement. Titled "There's hope in hard questions," the company's latest ad has been unsettling viewers with its weird imagery and doomer-ist tone. The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming start) before pivoting to a series of still images. These images include: a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine where (presumably) raw materials for smartphones are being dug up. Meanwhile, a voice-over track features different people asking questions like "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" In short: Not exactly the family friendly crowdpleaser of the year. At the same time, it's also not particularly far afield from the company's past messaging. Anthropic has consistently attempted to depict itself as the ethical foil to other AI companies. This latest marketing stunt -- which leans into criticism of AI as a way to make Anthropic seem aware of (and, therefore, distinctly worthy of) the responsibility it carries -- would appear to be more of the same. Not everybody is having it, however. Sam Altman -- the CEO of Anthropic's chief rival -- kicked off the criticism with some pithy trolling. "i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something," Altman posted to X on Monday. Other skeptics -- many of whom seem to work in the tech industry -- came out of the woodwork to remark upon Anthropic's odd choice of imagery and tone. "Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever," another person said. "the EAs [effective altruists] at anthropic really must be living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think this would go down well," a critical poster remarked. As some have pointed out, Anthropic is following a very time-tested marketing playbook here. That playbook involves a brand calling out and owning the harms caused by its industry as a way to demonstrate that it is the company best positioned to avoid or correct those harms. But even if it's a familiar playbook, it seems to have backfired here -- particularly the decision to include a brief shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetary. "I can't stress enough how fucked up it is that Anthropic is running an ad that includes this image asking "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to"," said one commenter, sharing the cemetary image that appears in the ad. People kept coming back to the graveyard imagery. "Out of everything in that ad this part was exceptionally weird and sinister," another person wrote, sharing the same image. Personally, the ad vaguely reminds me of the propaganda sequence in The Parallax View -- the 1970s paranoid thriller about an evil corporation involved in an MK-Ultra-esque conspiracy to create brainwashed assassins. This is probably not the best association to have for a company that would like to prove it is acting as a force for good in the world. Anthropic's marketing has made a splash before. In February, during the Super Bowl, the company unleashed a slew of ads that humorously took aim at OpenAI's decision to include ads in ChatGPT. Those ads earned it a good amount of positive buzz -- as well as the smoldering rage of its competitor.

New Anthropic Ad Implies AI Could Kill Us All

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Anthropic is doing what Anthropic does best: putting on its most concerned face so it can convince you they're the good guys in the industry. Last week, the world's most valuable AI startup revealed a new commercial that took an unorthodox approach to promoting its technology. Rather than diving straight into bubbly optimism, it starts with a series of grim images as we hear voiceovers from different speakers ask some hard-hitting questions about AI. You couldn't blame someone for thinking they were watching a PSA. It starts with a burning house -- which always bodes well. When someone asks, "Can AI be trusted?" we're shown what looks like surveillance footage with an AI algorithm scanning the faces of everyone in a crowd. The most striking sequence comes right after. "Who's going to hit the brakes if we need to?" another voice says. Then it cuts to an image of a cemetery lined with hundreds of headstones. You don't need to ask Claude to explain this one to you. Anthropic is clearly acknowledging the fear that AI could kill us all. But this is actually a feel-good story -- at least in the eyes of Anthropic. The tagline, "There's hope in hard questions," assures the viewer that their concerns over AI -- like its potential to destroy jobs or erode or ability to think -- are all perfectly valid, but more importantly, that these are questions which Anthropic's leaders are keeping themselves up at night grappling with. "People have a lot of hard questions about AI," an announcement from the company states. "It's our job to address them." The commercial, which aired during the World Cup quarterfinal clash between Argentina and Switzerland over the weekend, quickly drew criticism online. One viral post mocked the thinking behind the ad, writing, "When we raise the question of stopping a dangerously powerful superintelligence we show 300 American gravestones for half a second." Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired a shot. "i thought this was satire," he wrote in his typical all-lowercase style. The ad is Anthropic in a nutshell. A key part of the company's mythology is that it was founded by former OpenAI employees who wanted to focus on safe AI development. CEO Dario Amodei claims that he could've been the one to release a chatbot that changed the world instead of OpenAI with ChatGPT, but held off because he was too concerned about the tech's risks. Amodei has also been strikingly forward about AI's risks, saying it could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, while dangling the possibility that its models may already be conscious. Recently, the company even called for a global "pause" on AI development because it feared the technology could spiral out of human control. (It also hired an economist who said that a 33 percent risk of human extinction from AI was acceptable.) Those may seem like counterproductive things for the creator of one of the most widely used chatbots in the world to say. But it all serves a very deliberate point. By being the ones that doomsay about AI the most, Anthropic can also present itself as the only company that can be trusted to develop it. Its actual track record suggests otherwise. In February, it dropped a key safety pledge that vowed it would stop training an AI system if it couldn't guarantee it had proper guardrails in place. And while it fought with the Pentagon against its tech being used in mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, it emerged that its Claude AI was being used to select strike targets in Iran. One person responding to the company's ad said it best: "Can Anthropic be trusted?"