Anthropic’s latest advertisement has unsettled viewers with its bleak imagery and doomer tone.
The ad content
The campaign, titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” opens with footage of a burning house before shifting to a series of still photographs. These images depict a crowd under facial recognition surveillance, a homeless person sleeping on a street, rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and labourers digging raw materials for smartphones.
A voice-over asks questions such as “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”. The result is not exactly a family friendly crowdpleaser.
Anthropic has consistently attempted to depict itself as the ethical foil to other AI companies. This marketing stunt leans into criticism of the industry to suggest the company is aware of the responsibility it carries.
The backlash
Sam Altman, the CEO of Anthropic’s chief rival, kicked off the criticism with some pithy trolling. “i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something,” Altman posted to X on Monday.
Other skeptics, many of whom work in the tech industry, remarked upon the odd choice of imagery and tone. “Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever,” one person said.
“the EAs [effective altruists] at anthropic really must be living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think this would go down well,” a critical poster wrote.
Some have pointed out that Anthropic is following a time-tested marketing playbook. That playbook involves a brand calling out and owning the harms caused by its industry to demonstrate it is best positioned to avoid or correct those harms.
But even if it is a familiar playbook, it seems to have backfired here. The decision to include a brief shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetary drew particular ire. “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”,” said one commenter, sharing the cemetery image.
People kept coming back to the graveyard imagery. “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 to have for a company that would like to prove it is acting as a force for good in the world.
What it means
Anthropic’s marketing has made a splash before. In February, during the Super Bowl, the company unleashed a slew of ads that humorously took aim at OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT. Those ads earned it a good amount of positive buzz — as well as the smoldering rage of its competitor.
