Anthropic’s latest ad is backfiring fast

Anthropic’s new ad, “There’s hope in hard questions,” is getting a rough reception for imagery many viewers found unsettling rather than persuasive. The spot opens with a burning house before shifting to still images of facial-recognition surveillance, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be laborers mining raw materials for smartphones.

Over those visuals, a voice-over asks questions including “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” The campaign fits Anthropic’s long-running effort to present itself as the more ethical counterpoint to other AI companies, but this time that message appears to have misfired.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and one of Anthropic’s biggest rivals, mocked the ad on X on Monday.

“i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something,”

Other critics, many apparently from the tech industry, were just as blunt.

Recommended reading

DeepSeek eyes $1.5B raise at $71B ahead of IPO

“Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever,”

“[T]he EAs [effective altruists] at anthropic really must be living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think this would go down well,”

A particular flashpoint was a brief shot that appears to come from Arlington National Cemetery. That image, paired with the line “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”, drew especially sharp criticism, with multiple viewers calling it weird, sinister, and deeply misjudged.

TechCrunch notes that the campaign follows a familiar corporate playbook: acknowledge an industry’s harms to suggest your company is best positioned to avoid them. Anthropic has pulled off attention-grabbing marketing before. In February, during the Super Bowl, it ran ads poking fun at OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT — a campaign that generated positive buzz and irritated its competitor. This one is landing very differently.