Anthropic's latest brand ad has caused controversy on social platforms. Advertising opens in burning houses and then turns to images of face recognition surveillance, street dwellers, gravestones and work by miners, and the hymns throw questions like “AI can be trusted” and “Who can do it if you have to step on the brakes”.
Altman's openly mocking.
This set of elements quickly elicits a lot of negative feedback. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, first wrote on X that he thought it was a sarcasm. Later, a number of technologists joined the criticism and questioned why Anthropic chose such visual elements and expressions.
It has been assessed that Anthropic is an excellent company, but that he has made “the worst business diffusion”. The view was also expressed that internal judgement of the external perception was incorrect in order for such advertisements to be considered to have a positive response.
Continuation of the security narrative
From the company's past presentation to the outside world, Anthropic has always wanted to shape itself into a more safety- and ethical party isolated from other AI companies. The ad continued a similar line of thought, namely, to present the potential risks of AI first, and then to highlight the company ' s awareness of the issues involved.
This is not new. One of the common ways in which brands can be disseminated is to proactively point out industry harm and place themselves in a “better place to solve”. Only this time, there's a general perception that Anthropic is not sure of the right scale.
Cemetery images are offensive.
The most critical of the whole ad was a short picture suspected to be taken from the Arlington National Cemetery. According to several commentators, the combination of graveyard images with questions like “Who sets the brakes” is too negative to convey.
The scene was repeatedly mentioned in a number of discussions, which made the entire advertisement particularly strange. What was intended to emphasize prudential and responsible communication ultimately allowed some audiences to focus on their own way of expressing themselves, rather than on the positions that companies wanted to convey.