Anthropic's Doomer Ad Draws Backlash, Altman Trolling
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- Anthropic released an ad titled "There's hope in hard questions" that opens with a burning house and cycles through still images of facial recognition surveillance, a homeless person sleeping on the street, cemetery tombstones, and laborers in a mine, overlaid with voice-over questions including "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?"
- Sam Altman, CEO of rival OpenAI, kicked off the mockery on X, writing he "kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something."
- Critics zeroed in on what appears to be Arlington National Cemetery imagery in the ad, with one commenter calling it "exceptionally weird and sinister" to pair with the brake-question voiceover.
- The ad follows a familiar playbook of brands owning their industry's harms to position themselves as best equipped to fix them — consistent with Anthropic's longstanding self-presentation as the "ethical foil" to other AI companies.
- Earlier this year, in February during the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a series of ads mocking OpenAI's decision to insert ads in ChatGPT, earning positive buzz and the "smoldering rage" of its competitor — a stark tonal contrast with the current misfire.
Why it matters: Anthropic has spent the past year positioning itself as the AI industry's self-appointed "ethical foil," most recently with viral Super Bowl ads mocking OpenAI's monetization. This time the doomer-ist execution drew swift public ridicule from Altman himself, handing the rival a chance to question whether Anthropic's self-proclaimed seriousness on AI risk is genuine brand identity or theatrical marketing.
