Anthropic, the AI company that fancies itself the ethical choice in a sea of algorithmic gremlins, has released a new ad that's making viewers wonder if they accidentally clicked on a dystopian film trailer. Titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” the commercial opens with a burning house - because nothing says 'trust us with artificial intelligence' like arson imagery - before cutting to a series of stills featuring facial recognition surveillance, a homeless person, a cemetery, and laborers mining smartphone materials. A voice-over asks, “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” - questions that, frankly, the ad itself seems to answer with a resounding 'probably not.'

Sam Altman, CEO of rival OpenAI, kicked off the criticism by posting on X: “i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.” Other tech industry observers piled on, with one calling it “the worst corporate communications ever” and another noting that “the EAs at anthropic really must be living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think this would go down well.” The ad’s inclusion of what appears to be Arlington National Cemetery drew particular ire, with one commenter sharing the image and saying, “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’.”

This is a familiar playbook - owning industry harms to position yourself as the responsible one - but it seems to have backfired spectacularly here. The ad vaguely recalls the propaganda sequence from the 1970s paranoid thriller *The Parallax View*, which is probably not the vibe Anthropic was going for. In February, the company ran Super Bowl ads that humorously mocked OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads, earning positive buzz. This time, they've traded humor for doom, and the internet is not amused.