Anthropic is widely recognized for its creative marketing strategies, but the AI company may have pushed the boundaries a bit too far with its latest advertisement. The spot, titled "There’s hope in hard questions," has left viewers unsettled due to its bizarre imagery and bleak, doomsday tone. The ad opens with footage of a house engulfed in flames—hardly a warm and fuzzy start—before transitioning into a series of still images. These include: a crowd monitored by facial recognition technology, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be laborers working in a mine, presumably extracting raw materials for smartphones. Meanwhile, a voiceover features different people asking questions like "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?"

In short, this is not exactly the family-friendly crowd-pleaser of the year. At the same time, it aligns closely with the company’s established messaging. Anthropic has consistently positioned itself as the ethical alternative to other AI firms. This latest marketing stunt—which leans into criticism of AI to make Anthropic appear aware of and worthy of the responsibility it carries—seems to follow the same pattern. However, not everyone is buying it. Sam Altman, the CEO of Anthropic’s main rival, kicked off the criticism with some pointed trolling. "i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something," Altman posted on X Monday. Other skeptics, many of whom work in the tech industry, also voiced their concerns about Anthropic’s odd choice of imagery and tone. "Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever," one person commented. "The EAs [effective altruists] at Anthropic really must be living in a bubble of AI psychosis to think this would go down well," another critic remarked.

As some have noted, Anthropic is following a well-established marketing playbook. This approach involves a brand acknowledging and taking ownership of the harms caused by its industry to demonstrate that it is best positioned to avoid or correct those harms. But even though it’s a familiar strategy, 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,'" one commenter wrote, sharing the cemetery image from the ad. The graveyard imagery drew repeated criticism. "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 a force for good in the world. Anthropic’s marketing has made waves before. In February, during the Super Bowl, the company released a series of ads that humorously targeted OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT. Those ads earned it a lot of positive buzz—as well as the smoldering rage of its competitor.