Ironically, the latest ad was meant to show the opposite. That means Anthropic is listening. The testimonials came from people the company interviewed during its U.S. roadshow last spring as part of a broader effort that surveyed more than 120,000 people in 159 countries. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, told TIME in a recent interview that the campaign is “not only because people’s thoughts and feelings and worries and excitement and concerns about AI are very legitimate, but also because as a company and at Anthropic (one of the leaders in actually training these models and building this technology)” “This is the culmination of the work we’ve done so far, basically around this concept, which is what we really want to hear.” (Anthropic did not provide comments for this article at the time of publication.)
The controversy the ad has sparked is a symptom of a deeper rift. Warnings from the AI industry about the risks of AI are often dismissed as mere marketing. For example, when Anthropic chose not to release Mythos Preview because it was too risky to expose its cybersecurity features, the government took that warning seriously. However, many of the people did not do so. Critics treated the announcement as a sophisticated marketing stunt. That said, hackers used a weaker version of Claude to steal 150 gigabytes of data from the Mexican government two months ago, making Mythos Preview significantly more powerful by independent measurements.
