Anthropic's Latest Ad Unsettled Viewer Due to Its Dystopian Tone

IBL News | New York

Anthropic’s newest ad, full of weird and doomerist images, raised eyebrows and unsettled viewers.

Titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” the one and a minute half duration ad begins with a video of a burning house.

It follows with a series of still images that include a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and a group of laborers toiling in a mine with old smartphones.

Meanwhile, a voice-over track features various people — whom the company stated “are from real people we’ve spoken with” — asking questions such as “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”

Anthropic justified the ad’s tone by arguing, “We don’t get the benefits of AI without addressing the hard questions.”

It also invited users to participate in the debate by consuming tokens. A user wrote, “Can AI be trusted?” To answer the question, please renew your tokens, you have used all of your tokens.”

The AI giant has attempted to depict itself as an ethical company in AI while pursuing a multi-billion-dollar valuation in the market.

“The ad vaguely reminds the propaganda sequence in “The Parallax View” — the 1970s paranoid thriller about an evil corporation involved in an MK-Ultra-esque conspiracy to create brainwashed assassins,” wrote TechCrunch.

During the Super Bowl, Anthropic unleashed several ads targeting OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, kicked off the criticism with some pithy trolling.

i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something https://t.co/4AVBA93Z27

— Sam Altman (@sama) July 14, 2026

“Absolutely dystopian, disgusting, and horrifying. Dark times we live in,” responded a user, echoing general comments.