Anthropic's 'Hard Questions' ad sparks industry backlash with dystopian imagery and confusing tone

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.

Video: Will Frontier A.I. Labs Continue Poaching Academic Economists?

This week on "Hard Fork," co-hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton talk with Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor and A.I. expert, about frontier A.I. labs hiring economists from academic departments -- and what his poaching price would be. A lot of your colleagues in academia are going to take jobs at A.I. labs. Are you worried that that is going to hollow out the ranks of academic economics departments? And what is your poaching price for any A.I. frontier lab that is interested in hiring you? I've been resisting so far, but I do see, like, my colleagues here in the offices next door, my friends, my students, a lot of them have gone to take jobs at frontier labs. And I got to say, by and large, you know, these frontier jobs, they're doing great work. And they get access to amazing data. And so that's exciting. At the same time, I think there's a role for people that, you know, don't have a boss who, you know, is looking to make profits for the frontier labs. And, you know, even if the reality is that they're unbiased, there's going to be a perception that they're speaking for that company, and we need people who aren't as affected by that. I'm not saying academia is completely unaffected, either. So, you know, I do hope people will stay. A lot of smart people will stay in academia and continue to do what I'm doing. I've sat down very hard. I've had offers from frontier labs, and I've thought about it. And, for me, the marginal utility of more money isn't that high. So, I just sort of like what I'm doing right now. Stanford has been great to me. And, I like just being able to have a perch where I can do the research that I'm doing. So. What I'm hearing you say, Eric, is that it would take some kind of, like, meta superintelligence Labs style offer, like, maybe $1 billion to get you out of your chair and and go work for a frontier lab. I don't know, I maybe there's something wrong with me, but I feel like, like, what am I going to do, get a bigger house? As far as I don't know. I mean, you know, so. So I kind of. I feel like I have the greatest job, you know, don't tell my dean or look up my salary, but, but I feel like I'm. I'm, like, basically very happy with what I'm doing. Whatever amount of money I had, I would be doing basically what I'm doing right now. So I'm lucky in that not everyone is lucky enough to have a job like that. Maybe you guys, do you guys think you're having fun? And hopefully we'll be entering a world in the future where more and more people can just be doing what they really enjoy doing. Like I do. And and money won't be the main reason that they pick one job versus the other. Oh, wouldn't that be nice? I like it. Well. Well, we really do appreciate the work that you do. It's great to have, you know, strong, independent research and data about this that we can, you know, rely on, as we do our work. So, thank you very much, Eric. Thanks, Eric. Thank you so much. Fun talking to you guys. I'll say, I think this ad is a disaster. Like I really do like it's it's an extremely confusing set of messages. And I think it's like it is unlikely to me that the average person would take away a positive message about anthropic or AI from this ad. Oh, I don't know. I, I want to sort of like meekly defend the ad by saying that I think it's good if I companies are honest about the the fears that they have. I think it would be very bad if they just all turned into like sunny, optimistic marketing companies. Sure. But is the right format for that, like brand marketing, you know, like here's what I find confusing. So at the end of this ad, which just essentially I believe has like, sound clips of average people asking their questions about AI or discussing their wishes for AI. At the very end of it, anthropic shows its tagline, which is keep thinking. And when anthropic tells me, keep thinking. I feel like, I'm reading one of those blog posts where they tell senior citizens to keep doing crossword puzzles to keep their mind active. You know what I mean? It's like if you're building superintelligence, that is going to do all of the thinking, what exactly do you want me to do the thinking for? You know what I mean? So I just think the entire brand message is getting very, very confused and it is making people feel bad. And I think anthropic needs to think about that. anthropic posted a new ad, for Claude that is sort of a longer ad. It's kind of a sort of montage. It's talking about hard questions. It starts with this very bizarre sequence of images of one is like a building on fire, and one is with a cemetery, like a row of headstones. It looks to be like a military cemetery in Arlington National Cemetery, where my grandfather is buried. Kevin, what is it doing in this ad? And so the of the sort of voiceover on the ad is talking about how, how can you know who's going to who's going to hit the brakes if we need to slow down this technology, can I be trusted? Like, these are the kinds of hard questions. You know, the ad eventually gets to a more hopeful and positive message, but it starts with this kind of like, very doomy picture of the world on fire, literally as a result of this technology. And Sam Altman did not like this ad. Many other people did not like this ad. I mean, OpenAI allegedly approached one of Apple's manufacturing partners and tricked them into showing them some sort of secret metal treatment finishing process that Apple uses. Yeah.

90 Seconds That Encapsulate the AI Industry

In an impressive challenge to the idea that no publicity is bad publicity, Anthropic is now promoting itself with images of disaster, death, and human suffering. The AI company's latest ad, which debuted during a World Cup match last week, is a perplexing 90-second artifact. The commercial opens with footage of a house engulfed in flames and the crackling sound of burning wood. From there, a series of dark images -- rows of gravestones in a cemetery, a homeless couple sleeping on the street, laborers working in a West African granite quarry -- flash across the screen. These stills are accompanied by a series of voice-overs: "Can AI be trusted?" "Who's going to hit the brakes if we need to?" "How do we really ensure that what we're aiming to achieve really does benefit the majority of people?" The questions are left unanswered. Halfway through, the ad moves from dystopian film trailer to feel-good corporate ad. We see a photo of a mother sitting beside her daughter as a voice speculates that AI will allow her to be a better mom. Later, a medical worker uses a laptop covered in Anthropic stickers. "Maybe it'll cure some great things," a man says. A nature montage plays -- there's a humpback whale, grassy hills, and people hugging. Finally, text flashes on the screen: "There's hope in hard questions." In the background, we see the ocean. And then Anthropic's tagline: "Keep thinking." The commercial is tone-deaf. It's one thing to mention the possibility of hitting the brakes on AI progress; it's another to overlay the question on an image of dead Americans. The video is also just confusing. Does Anthropic think that AI is going to set the world on fire and leave us jobless, or that its chatbot, Claude, will lead us to a more human future where we spend our days watching whales by the sea? The company's answer seems to be: We don't know. The video has been mocked online. Some people likened it to hypothetical ads by oil companies professing concerns about the environment. The head of one tech-media company posted "I actually like the tagline but we don't need the shots of *checks notes* burning houses and graves!" Meanwhile, OpenAI's Sam Altman -- who has a self-interest in undercutting Anthropic -- chimed in to call the ad "satire." This is not the first time that a company has botched its advertising around AI: OpenAI has had its own share of embarrassing ads. By now, it seems like a rite of passage. Two years ago, Apple ran a commercial depicting musical instruments and art supplies being crushed by a hydraulic press. The ad was supposed to show off just how much creativity could be compacted into an iPad, but instead it seemed to symbolize generative AI's bludgeoning of the arts. Apple subsequently apologized. During the Olympics that summer, Google ran an ad in which a young girl wants to write fan-mail to the track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone -- so her dad fires up Gemini and asks the bot for help. The ad was highly unpopular, and Google pulled it from TV. If anything, Anthropic has had a comparatively good run until now. During this year's Super Bowl, the company aired a commercial dunking on OpenAI for putting ads in user conversations, which even Altman said made him laugh (despite his qualms with how the ad presented OpenAI.) For all the criticism, Anthropic's latest commercial captures the company's ambivalence about its own existence. Here is a leading AI company worth nearly $1 trillion arguing that the very technology it is racing to commercialize may well imperil the world. "We founded Anthropic because we believe the impact of AI might be comparable to that of the industrial and scientific revolutions, but we aren't confident it will go well," the company wrote in 2023. In recent years, Anthropic has made a show of positioning itself as the ethical AI company. Earlier this year, it attracted the ire of the Trump administration when it pushed back against the Pentagon's demands for unrestricted access to its AI models over concerns that the technology could be misused. The new advertisement is part of a broader campaign Anthropic is running to address the "hard questions" raised by AI's progress. In an email, an Anthropic spokesperson pointed me to a series of blog posts about the initiative: This spring, the company traveled across the country to better understand the public's views about AI. In the video's description on YouTube, Anthropic says that every question in the ad comes from a person that the company spoke with. (The spokesperson declined to comment further.) The idea that Anthropic is worried about AI's negative impacts and wants to hear from the public is certainly better than the alternative. The trouble, though, is that as Anthropic has matured, the company's constant messaging about its anxiety over the future of AI has become less palatable and, occasionally, downright maddening. "Anthropic is at war with itself," my colleague Matteo Wong wrote in January. Since then, the company's valuation has soared. As it develops more advanced AI models and races toward a public offering, the contradictions are becoming more difficult to square. However sincere Anthropic may be -- Wong noted after several visits to the company that its employees can be "almost pathologically earnest" -- it's no surprise that people are wary of the world's most valuable private company asking the "hard questions" about AI. The same tension is at play across the industry. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a mission to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." In the years since ChatGPT was first released, the company seemingly has prioritized financial gain instead. By now, it feels pointless for Anthropic and the rest of the industry to simply pose questions about AI ethics and safety. These questions are already consuming the public's imagination amid a mounting AI backlash. What matters is the answers. And on that front, AI companies have less to offer. Perhaps the commercial's tagline provides a helpful clue: For now, Anthropic will keep thinking.

Video: Anthropic's New Ad for Claude Is a Mess

The "Hard Fork" co-hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton break down Anthropic's latest ad for Claude and discuss the confusing messages of the commercial. I'll say, I think this ad is a disaster. Like, I really do. Like, it's an extremely confusing set of messages. And I think it's, like, it is unlikely to me that the average person would take away a positive message about Anthropic or A.I. from this ad. Oh, I don't know. I want to sort of, like, meekly defend the ad by saying that I think it's good if A.I. companies are honest about the the fears that they have. I think it would be very bad if they just all turned into like sunny, optimistic marketing companies. Well, sure. But is the right format for that, like, brand marketing? You know, like, here's what I find confusing. So at the end of this ad, which just, essentially, I believe, has, like, sound clips of average people asking their questions about A.I. or discussing their wishes for A.I. At the very end of it, Anthropic shows its tagline, which is "Keep thinking." And when Anthropic tells me, "Keep thinking," I feel like, I'm reading one of those blog posts where they tell senior citizens to keep doing crossword puzzles to keep their mind active. You know what I mean? It's like if you're building superintelligence that is going to do all of the thinking, what exactly do you want me to do the thinking for? Do you know what I mean? So, I just think the entire brand message is getting very, very confused, and it is making people feel bad. And I think Anthropic needs to think about that. anthropic posted a new ad, for Claude that is sort of a longer ad. It's kind of a sort of montage. It's talking about hard questions. It starts with this very bizarre sequence of images of one is like a building on fire, and one is with a cemetery, like a row of headstones. It looks to be like a military cemetery in Arlington National Cemetery, where my grandfather is buried. Kevin, what is it doing in this ad? And so the of the sort of voiceover on the ad is talking about how, how can you know who's going to who's going to hit the brakes if we need to slow down this technology, can I be trusted? Like, these are the kinds of hard questions. You know, the ad eventually gets to a more hopeful and positive message, but it starts with this kind of like, very doomy picture of the world on fire, literally as a result of this technology. And Sam Altman did not like this ad. Many other people did not like this ad. I mean, OpenAI allegedly approached one of Apple's manufacturing partners and tricked them into showing them some sort of secret metal treatment finishing process that Apple uses. Yeah.

'I thought it was satire': Sam Altman mocks Anthropic's latest AI ad that's getting widely blasted for being 'dystopian marketing slop'

* Anthropic has a new 'hard questions' ad for Claude and AI * Reactions to the short clip have been mixed * OpenAI boss Sam Altman says the ad feels like satire Anthropic has a new ad out for its Claude AI chatbot, and it ties into its Hard Questions project -- an attempt to bring attention to some of the main concerns and hopes that people have about the future of AI. Will it take my job? Can it lead to new scientific discoveries? Why is there a new data center in my neighborhood? You can see the short film below, which features voices "from real people" that Anthropic has spoken to. Alongside shots of burning buildings, lab researchers, and racks and racks of hard drives, we have ruminations over whether AI can be trusted and how it might affect communities, education, and what it means to be human. Anthropic has boldly left the comments enabled on the video, and it's fair to say there's a mix of opinion: various posters have branded the clip as "dystopian marketing slop", a sign of "dark times", and "pretty horrifying". One commenter points out that the final "keep thinking" tagline is a strange choice for a technology that generally makes us think less. There are plenty of positive opinions too, with some calling the ad "profoundly beautiful", "great", and "thought-provoking", and even "the greatest commercial I've ever seen" in one case. Quite a few YouTuber users in the comments are simply asking for more access to the latest Claude Fable AI model. Questions and answers The ad has even caught the attention of Sam Altman, CEO of Anthropic rival OpenAI. His response to the clip was to say that he "thought this was satire", though it's worth remembering that he's not the most neutral of observers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was previously vice president of research at OpenAI. What we can say for sure about the ad is that it's addressing many of the issues that are in the public conversation right now when it comes to AI technology. Anthropic has also launched a Hard Questions web portal where you can listen to some of the conversations the company has had with people across the US. The topics covered include the use of AI in medical diagnosis, safeguards around the misuse of AI, the resources needed to run data centers, how the technology might impact our critical thinking skills and creativity, which jobs might ultimately be replaced by AI, and what it's going to be like for kids to grow up with AI. Clearly this debate is going to go on and on across the years to come, but it does feel like the tension has never been greater between the hype and the backlash around AI. Big AI companies like Anthropic are going to have to work hard to keep users and governments on side as the technology becomes even more powerful and pervasive. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

The Backlash to Anthropic's Ad Misses Something Bigger

People were quick to dunk on a recent Anthropic ad, part of a campaign designed to show the company is listening to people's concerns about AI. The video features audio of people asking questions like "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's going to hit the brakes?" over flashing images that included protests, the unhoused, and a flaming home. After pivoting to a warmer tone -- "Could AI help people stop feeling misunderstood?" -- the ad finishes with the text, "There's hope in hard questions," followed by Anthropic's tagline: "Keep thinking." Among the online critics was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. "i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something," he posted to X. The ad's most liked YouTube comment calls it "dystopian marketing slop." Atlantic writer Lila Shroff described the ad as "tone-deaf." In the words of one X poster, Anthropic seems to want to "scare everyone about AI, then pose as the only ones humble enough to be trusted." This isn't the first time an Anthropic commercial has divided viewers. The company's Super Bowl spot, which poked fun at OpenAI for testing ads in ChatGPT, won a Grand Prix in the Film category at Cannes Lions 2026. Yet it ranked in the bottom 3% for general audience likeability. according to one survey. Many people had no idea OpenAI was considering bringing ads to ChatGPT, so the punchline landed flat -- perhaps indicative of the wider cultural disconnect between Silicon Valley and everyone else. Ironically, the latest ad was meant to show the opposite: that Anthropic is listening. The voices came from people the company interviewed on a U.S. roadshow last spring, part of a wider effort that has surveyed more than 120,000 people across 159 countries. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president, told TIME in a recent interview that the campaign was a "culmination of work that we have been doing, essentially around this concept that people's thoughts and feelings and worries and excitements and concerns about AI are not only very valid, but something that, as a company, as Anthropic -- one of the leaders in actually training these models and building this technology -- we really want to hear." (Anthropic did not provide comment for this article at the time of publication.) The controversy the ad stirred up is symptomatic of a deeper rupture. The AI industry's warnings about AI's risks are often dismissed as mere marketing. When Anthropic chose not to release Mythos Preview on the grounds that its cybersecurity capabilities were too dangerous to release, for example, governments took the warning seriously. But much of the public did not. Critics treated the announcement as a sophisticated marketing stunt -- even though, two months earlier, a hacker had used a weaker version of Claude to help steal 150 gigabytes of data from the Mexican government, and Mythos Preview is, by independent measures, significantly more powerful. To be sure, Anthropic benefits from presenting its models as uniquely powerful and itself as a responsible steward of a world-changing technology. And Anthropic has walked back safety pledges before. But taking Anthropic's warnings seriously is not the same as trusting it to solve the problem. Part of the public cynicism is born of the fact that Anthropic is racing as hard as anyone to build the technology it's warning us about. But that doesn't mean those warnings are insincere. The company believes that, were they to stop building AI, others would continue, and has therefore concluded the safest path is to try to lead its development.. The first proposition is plausible; the second is arguably self-serving. Along with OpenAI and Google DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic has recently said it would favor building a way to internationally coordinate an option to one day slow down model development. The fossil-fuel industry suppressed evidence of climate change for decades, just as Big Tobacco obscured the link between smoking and lung cancer. Had those industries spoken plainly about the dangers of their products, their motives would rightly have been scrutinized -- but the candor itself would have been preferable to years of deceit. The same should be true of AI. A company that cops to the risks of its business is preferable to one that minimises or conceals them, even if you believe doing so doubles as brand-building. The ad's most provocative image was of American soldiers' tombs at the Arlington National Cemetery. For some, evoking death and sacrifice was perplexing and distasteful; a step too far. "I can't stress enough how f -- ed up it is that Anthropic is running an ad that includes this image," Zack Korman, CEO of AI cybersecurity company Embroidery posted to X. But if you believe, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei does, that AI poses a 10% to 25% chance of a civilisation-ending catastrophe, the image of tombs is a stark acknowledgement of the stakes. Amodei's assessment of the dangers may be right or wrong, but an ad that grapples with those risks is arguably more honest than previous campaigns that present Claude as a tool for tinkerers and problem solvers.

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?"