Anthropic's new Claude ad, "Hope Exists in Hard Problems," was meant to signal that the company is serious about AI risk. But its opening montage goes hard: burning houses, facial-recognition cameras, people sleeping on the street, and row after row of gravestones. The voiceover then asks, "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who hits the brakes when it goes off the rails?"
Viewers didn't exactly read it as reassurance. Plenty thought the whole thing looked like a trailer for an AI doomsday movie. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he initially assumed the ad was from a parody account. One viewer said their relatives saw it on TV and called to ask, "Why is an AI company threatening us?"
The graveyard especially drew criticism. The narrator is in the middle of asking who's accountable just as the cemetery fills the screen.