Anthropic's latest advertisement, titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” has been unsettling viewers with its weird imagery and doomer-ist tone. The ad begins with a video of a burning house before pivoting to still images including a crowd being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and laborers toiling in a mine. A voice-over features questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, criticized the ad on X, posting “i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.” Other skeptics remarked on the odd imagery and tone, with one person stating, “Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever.” Critics particularly focused on a brief shot appearing to be from Arlington National Cemetery, with one commenter saying, “I can’t stress enough how fucked up it is that Anthropic is running an ad that includes this image asking ‘Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?’”