Anthropic released a new advertisement, which triggered a massive backlash online. It featured burning houses, graveyards, and industrial decay. Clearly, the internet wasn't impressed.
The ad, promoting the company's Claude artificial intelligence assistant, opens with a rapid-fire sequence of dark visuals and asks, in voiceover: "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" It shifts midway toward more optimistic framing, but the first half left a mark that the second half could not fully erase. Within days, the ad had become a talking point across the tech industry, not for the reasons Anthropic likely intended. The video ad got 3.3 million views on X alone since it went live on 9 July.
