Anthropic's latest ad unsettles viewers

Anthropic is known for its creative marketing, but the AI company may have been a little too creative when it dreamed up its latest ad.

Titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” the company’s newest advertisement has unsettled viewers with its bizarre imagery and doomer-ist tone.

The ad opens with a video of a burning house (hardly a heartwarming start) before shifting to a series of still images. These include: a crowd under facial recognition surveillance, 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 raw materials for smartphones are presumably dug up.

Meanwhile, a voiceover features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to?”

In short: Not exactly the family-friendly crowd-pleaser of the year. At the same time, it’s also not particularly far from the company’s past messaging. Anthropic has consistently tried to position 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 — appears to be more of the same.

Not everyone is buying it, though.

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 comment on 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 Cemetery. “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 cemetery 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 for a company that wants 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.