A recent Anthropic ad, part of a campaign designed to show the company is listening to people’s concerns about AI, has drawn backlash. The video features audio of questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s going to hit the brakes?” over images including protests, the unhoused, and a flaming home, before pivoting to a warmer tone and ending with “There’s hope in hard questions.” Critics included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who posted “i thought this was satire,” and an X poster who said Anthropic seems to want to “scare everyone about AI, then pose as the only ones humble enough to be trusted.” The ad’s most liked YouTube comment calls it “dystopian marketing slop.” 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. Anthropic’s president Daniela Amodei told TIME the campaign was a “culmination of work” around the concept that people’s concerns about AI are valid. The controversy is symptomatic of a deeper rupture, as the AI industry’s warnings about risks are often dismissed as marketing. When Anthropic chose not to release Mythos Preview because its cybersecurity capabilities were too dangerous, governments took the warning seriously, but much of the public treated it as a marketing stunt—even though a hacker had used a weaker version of Claude to help steal