The Backlash to Anthropic’s Ad Misses Something Bigger

Ironically, the latest ad was meant to show the opposite: that Anthropic is listening. The voices came from people the company interviewed on a U.S. roadshow last spring, part of a wider effort that has surveyed more than 120,000 people across 159 countries. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, told TIME in a recent interview that the campaign was a “culmination of work that we have been doing, essentially around this concept that people’s thoughts and feelings and worries and excitements and concerns about AI are not only very valid, but something that, as a company, as Anthropic—one of the leaders in actually training these models and building this technology—we really want to hear.” (Anthropic did not provide comment for this article at the time of publication.)

The controversy the ad stirred up is symptomatic of a deeper rupture. The AI industry’s warnings about AI’s risks are often dismissed as mere marketing. When Anthropic chose not to release Mythos Preview on the grounds that its cybersecurity capabilities were too dangerous to release, for example, governments took the warning seriously. But much of the public did not. Critics treated the announcement as a sophisticated marketing stunt—even though, two months earlier, a hacker had used a weaker version of Claude to help steal 150 gigabytes of data from the Mexican government, and Mythos Preview is, by independent measures, significantly more powerful.