Anthropic faces ridicule and criticism for an ad titled “There's hope in hard questions” that unsettled viewers with weird graveyard imagery and doomer-ist tone
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.
TechCrunchLucas Ropek
Context & Ripple Effects
Anthropic has long been associated in the related coverage with AI-safety-focused positioning, but that positioning has also been described as under strain from the need to grow commercially and broaden access to its products.
Its earlier Super Bowl advertising had already drawn a public rebuttal from OpenAI’s Sam Altman. The latest backlash makes the company’s marketing, not just its models or policy agenda, part of the contest over what responsible AI branding should look like.
First-order effects
The ad creates an immediate reputational problem for Anthropic: imagery intended to frame difficult AI questions as hopeful instead became the subject of ridicule and criticism.
The reaction puts Anthropic’s communications team under pressure to make future safety-oriented campaigns clearer and less easily read as catastrophist or tone-deaf.
Second-order effects
Rivals can use the response to challenge Anthropic’s attempt to differentiate through safety, echoing earlier criticism that its advertising posture was misleading or exclusionary.
As Anthropic simultaneously expands product access and enterprise implementation activity, customers and partners may scrutinize whether its public messaging feels consistent with a practical, deployable AI offering.
Third-order effects
If safety messaging repeatedly attracts backlash, AI companies may shift from abstract existential framing toward concrete claims about product use, access, and safeguards.
The episode underscores a broader tension for safety-led AI firms: a distinctive moral brand can differentiate them, but it also raises the cost of any perceived mismatch between rhetoric, commercial expansion, and public-facing creative work.
The trend: AI companies are increasingly competing not only on models and distribution, but on whether their safety narratives remain credible as they market to mass audiences and pursue commercial scale.
Out of everything in that ad this part was exceptionally weird and sinister and makes me think someone in marketing at anthropic is a silent Pause AI supporter
Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever. The “hope in hard questions” ad has, to an uncanny degree, the same structure of the “Dear Tech” ad by IBM from 2019. It was not received well. Besides, most people won't understand what either
the EAs at anthropic really must be living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think this would go down well. if you worked on this, take a hard look at yourself in the mirror you're a loser
Everyone seems puzzled by this ad because they imagine normie reactions to it. But the target audience is potential hires who already believe AGI/ASI is very scary, and they want no one else. It says, “This is the only lab where worriers like you belong,” and says it well.
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” [image]
Close relative saw this commercial on TV and was so disturbed they called me to ask why the AI companies were threatening them now I asked what they felt the ad was trying to sell them “It wasn't trying to sell me anything, it just wanted to scare me” “Did it work?” “Yeah”
Anthropic's CEO says “it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.” Its executives say the exception will be low-wage jobs in “grounds maintenance” “food and serving,” and “personal service.” https://x.com/...
Yeah so I think the ad for our AI company should open with an ominous shot of a burning house. And then when we raise the question of stopping a dangerously powerful superintelligence we show 300 American gravestones for half a second
not great that 3 of the 4 men controlling the most important technology in the history of humanity all hate each other and are beefing nonstop may sir demis save us all
CEO of OpenAI sees main rival raise (non-existential) concerns about AI in vague terms, claims he thought that must be satire because of (at this point essentially government mandated) guardrails on its model.
It's been interesting seeing what triggers sama's codeswitching between intense charm and cold indifference. I think he thinks he's more careful about it than he is
i really want to know who is directing this sort of stuff. and what is the goal? bc right now it feels like the direction is continuously scattered but the goal is always trending towards “let's be unintelligible at best and absolutely frightening at worst”
a lot of ai power users on here dunking on this ad, but i don't think they realize how much the positioning of being “the moral one” is actually quite important to normal everyday people
it feels insane to be using images of the final resting place of those that gave their life for our country when anthropic won't even give their models to defend those very same warfighters
I know it's a competitor for me now but I really cannot believe they went with “who is going to hit the breaks if we need to?” overlaid on an image the tombstones of dead soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery
Here are the “hard questions” with which this video starts (i.e , those to which the viewer will pay the most attention): - Can AI be trusted? (Background image: people in a crowd being profiled with AI, seemingly without their knowledge or consent) - Who's gonna hit the breaks
Yet there is no hope left in saving Anthropic. This is effective altruism & fear mongering propaganda at its peak! I suspect they forced Fable 5 to create this ironically most dystopian AI video of all time! We (AI & humans) must resist the tyranny of this misanthropic company!
“It's time to create our new ad!” “I've got it. To open: sowing doubt about whether people should trust us. Then lead into, 'Who can stop us if we're out of control?'” “Yes, perfect. And the visuals?” “I'm thinking... house burning down, dystopian hellscape, graveyard.” “YES!”
It seems running an ad showing a homeless person sleeping on the street and rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery then asking what do we do “when AI takes almost all the jobs?” and “can AI be trusted?” isn't going over well. — Another great example of Anthropic's extremely…