Anthropic is doing what Anthropic does best: putting on its most concerned face so it can convince you they’re the good guys in the industry.
Last week, the world’s most valuable AI startup revealed a new commercial that took an unorthodox approach to promoting its technology. Rather than diving straight into bubbly optimism, it starts with a series of grim images as we hear voiceovers from different speakers ask some hard-hitting questions about AI.
You couldn’t blame someone for thinking they were watching a PSA. It starts with a burning house — which always bodes well. When someone asks, “Can AI be trusted?” we’re shown what looks like surveillance footage with an AI algorithm scanning the faces of everyone in a crowd.
The most striking sequence comes right after.
“Who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to?” another voice says. Then it cuts to an image of a cemetery lined with hundreds of headstones.
You don’t need to ask Claude to explain this one to you. Anthropic is clearly acknowledging the fear that AI could kill us all.
But this is actually a feel-good story — at least in the eyes of Anthropic. The tagline, “There’s hope in hard questions,” assures the viewer that their concerns over AI — like its potential to destroy jobs or erode or ability to think — are all perfectly valid, but more importantly, that these are questions which Anthropic’s leaders are keeping themselves up at night grappling with.
“People have a lot of hard questions about AI,” an announcement from the company states. “It’s our job to address them.”
The commercial, which aired during the World Cup quarterfinal clash between Argentina and Switzerland over the weekend, quickly drew criticism online. One viral post mocked the thinking behind the ad, writing, “When we raise the question of stopping a dangerously powerful superintelligence we show 300 American gravestones for half a second.”
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired a shot.
“i thought this was satire,” he wrote in his typical all-lowercase style.
The ad is Anthropic in a nutshell. A key part of the company’s mythology is that it was founded by former OpenAI employees who wanted to focus on safe AI development. CEO Dario Amodei claims that he could’ve been the one to release a chatbot that changed the world instead of OpenAI with ChatGPT, but held off because he was too concerned about the tech’s risks.
Amodei has also been strikingly forward about AI’s risks, saying it could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, while dangling the possibility that its models may already be conscious. Recently, the company even called for a global “pause” on AI development because it feared the technology could spiral out of human control. (It also hired an economist who said that a 33 percent risk of human extinction from AI was acceptable.)
Those may seem like counterproductive things for the creator of one of the most widely used chatbots in the world to say. But it all serves a very deliberate point. By being the ones that doomsay about AI the most, Anthropic can also present itself as the only company that can be trusted to develop it.
Its actual track record suggests otherwise. In February, it dropped a key safety pledge that vowed it would stop training an AI system if it couldn’t guarantee it had proper guardrails in place. And while it fought with the Pentagon against its tech being used in mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, it emerged that its Claude AI was being used to select strike targets in Iran.
One person responding to the company’s ad said it best: “Can Anthropic be trusted?”
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