Anthropic is known for its creative marketing, but the AI ​​company may have been a bit also creative when he evoked his most recent announcement.

Titled “There is hope in difficult questions,” the company’s latest ad has unsettled viewers with its strange images and fatalistic tone.

The ad begins with a video of a house on fire (not exactly a heartwarming start) before cutting to a series of still images. These images include a crowd of people being monitored using facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows and rows of headstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of workers hard at work in a mine where raw materials for smartphones are (presumably) being unearthed.

Meanwhile, a voiceover track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who is going to brake if necessary?”

Bottom line: Not exactly the family favorite of the year. At the same time, it’s also not far off from the company’s previous messaging. Anthropic has consistently tried to present itself as the ethical foil to other AI companies. This latest marketing stunt, which leans into criticizing AI as a way to make Anthropic appear aware of (and therefore clearly worthy of) the responsibility that comes with it, would seem to be more of the same.

However, not everyone has it.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Anthropic’s main rival, began the criticism with a brief trolling. “I thought this was satire, I kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something like that,” Altman posted on X on Monday.

Other skeptics, many of whom appear to work in the tech industry, came out of the woodwork to comment on Anthropic’s strange choice of imagery and tone.

“Anthropic is an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever,” another person said.

“[T]he EA [effective altruists] “At Anthropic we must really be living in an AI psychosis bubble to think this would work well,” commented one critical poster.

As some have pointed out, Anthropic is following a very time-tested marketing playbook. That playbook involves a brand standing out and taking responsibility for the harms caused by its industry as a way to demonstrate that it is the company best positioned to prevent or correct those harms.

But even if it’s a familiar primer, it seems to have backfired here, particularly the decision to include a brief shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetery. “I can’t stress enough how fucked up it is that Anthropic is running an ad that includes this image asking ‘Who’s going to brake if they have to?’” said one commenter, sharing the image of the cemetery featured in the ad.

People kept returning to the images of the cemetery. “Of everything in that ad, this part was exceptionally strange and sinister,” another person wrote, sharing the same image.

Personally, the ad vaguely reminds me of the propaganda sequence for “The Parallax View,” the 1970s paranoid thriller about an evil corporation involved in an MK-Ultra-style conspiracy to create brainwashed killers. This is probably not the best partnership for a company that would like to show that it is acting as a force for good in the world.

Anthropic’s marketing has made waves before. In February, during the Super Bowl, the company released a series of ads that humorously took aim at OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT. Those ads earned him a fair amount of positive feedback, as well as the simmering fury of his competitor.