Anthropic faces backlash over unsettling new advertisement

Anthropic has released a new advertisement titled “There’s hope in hard questions” that has unsettled viewers with its imagery and tone. The spot moves through a burning house, a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows of tombstones, and what appears to be laborers in a mine, presumably digging up raw materials, alongside a shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetary. A voice-over features people asking questions like whether AI can be trusted.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — Anthropic’s chief rival — mocked the ad on X on Monday, writing: “i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.” Other commentators, many of whom appear to work in the tech industry, criticized the company’s messaging as poor communications. One critical poster invoked Anthropic’s association with effective altruism (a philosophical movement focused on using evidence and reason to maximize benefit to others, closely tied to Anthropic’s founders), describing the company’s employees as living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think the ad would go down well. The Arlington National Cemetary shot in particular drew sustained backlash, with commenters calling it fucked up to pair that image with a question about hitting the brakes on AI, and describing that portion of the ad as exceptionally weird and sinister.

The campaign extends a pattern Anthropic has followed before: positioning itself as the ethical foil to other AI companies by calling attention to industry harms, implicitly framing itself as the company best equipped to manage them. In February, Anthropic ran a series of Super Bowl ads that humorously targeted OpenAI’s decision to put ads inside ChatGPT — a campaign that landed well with audiences. This latest attempt, leaning into darker, doomer-ist imagery rather than humor, has met a far chillier reception.

Why it matters

Anthropic’s attempt to position itself as an ethical foil to other AI companies by highlighting industry harms in its latest ad campaign has backfired, drawing heavy criticism for its unsettling imagery and tone — a reminder that the same “own the harms” playbook that won Anthropic goodwill during the Super Bowl can just as easily curdle into a public-relations liability.