Anthropic’s newest ad is creeping people out
TechCrunch Lucas Ropek
Anthropic dropped a new ad and it's freaking people out. Burning houses, graveyards, surveillance shots — not the mood you'd expect from an AI company selling trust.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Lucas Ropek — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Anthropic has never been shy about swinging for the fences with its marketing, but its latest spot might have swung a little too hard. The ad, called "There's hope in hard questions," opens on a burning house and only gets moodier from there: facial recognition scanning a crowd, a person sleeping rough, row after row of tombstones, and laborers working what looks like a mine tied to smartphone materials. Over it all, voices ask things like "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" It is not a light watch.
Still, the tone tracks with how Anthropic has positioned itself for a while now — as the AI lab willing to stare down the industry's risks rather than paper over them, and therefore the one you can trust to handle them responsibly. Leaning into criticism of AI, then presenting yourself as the company clear-eyed enough to name that criticism, is a familiar move for them.
The internet was not universally charmed. OpenAI's Sam Altman got the pile-on rolling with a jab on X, saying he assumed the ad was satire and kept expecting the account to turn out to be a parody handle. Others followed, with one person calling Anthropic an amazing company saddled with the worst corporate communications going, and another suggesting the effective altruists behind the ad seem to be living in something like an AI-induced bubble.
The cemetery shot drew the sharpest reaction. Multiple commenters zeroed in on what appears to be footage from Arlington National Cemetery, paired with the line about hitting the brakes, calling it flatly messed up and, separately, exceptionally weird and sinister. Out of everything in the ad, that image is the one people keep sharing.
This is the same company that scored real goodwill during the Super Bowl earlier this year, when it ran ads ribbing OpenAI over ChatGPT's move into advertising — a campaign that landed well and clearly annoyed its rival. This time, the tactic of owning industry harms to prove you're the one positioned to fix them seems to have curdled instead, undercut by imagery that reads more unsettling than reassuring.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Owning the scary stuff to look like the responsible adult in the room only works if the execution doesn't make people wonder about your own headspace, and a graveyard shot paired with existential dread questions is not the reassurance play Anthropic thinks it is. Compare that to the Super Bowl ads, which were funny and pointed and actually worked — this feels like the same company forgetting what made that campaign land in the first place.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch
