The numbers come first. A recent Gallup survey found that nearly half of adults under 30 now believe AI does more harm than good, up sharply from the year before, and that trust in businesses' use of AI has fallen after two years of gains. Pew's 2026 figures are worse: most Americans say AI is advancing too fast, and only a small minority expect its impact over the next two decades to be net positive. A Quinnipiac poll found that more than three-quarters of Americans say they trust AI only rarely or sometimes.
Anthropicco-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is aware of the problem. In a recent X post — unusual enough that its rarity was itself noted — Amodei argued that negative public perceptions of AI were not caused by his comments about risks, but because the industry had not yet delivered enough of the positive benefits it has promised, such as curing human diseases.
But the source material tells a more complicated story. Amodei has consistently positioned Anthropic as the AI company most committed to building AI safely, telling Fortune that 'AI safety continues to be the highest-level focus.' He and his sister Daniela split from OpenAI in 2021 due in part to differences over its approach to safety. He has raised concerns about autonomous weapons and AI surveillance with the Pentagon. He created a Responsible Scaling Policy modeled on biosafety tiers and issued public warnings about AI risk and job losses.
That messaging worked on one specific audience: engineers, safety researchers, enterprise buyers and investors who read Anthropic's focus on 'catastrophic risk' as diligence. Those buyers were always likely to trust Anthropic's motives. The broader public is a different matter.
The airline industry learned this lesson the hard way. Historian Richard Popp's research found that by the 1930s, carriers already operated under unwritten rules keeping any hint of danger out of advertising — no mountains, no night flying, no large bodies of water, no maintenance work. Pan Am broke the taboo in the 1980s, running a reassurance campaign amid hijacking and bombing threats against transatlantic flights. Then in December 1988, a bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Aviation security expert Glen Winn said that disaster convinced the entire industry to retire the word 'safe' from marketing for good.
The mechanism is linguistic. Linguist George Lakoff's 2004 book 'Don't Think of an Elephant' captured the dynamic: telling someone not to think of an elephant requires them to picture the elephant first. Stating a fear about yourself, the airline industry discovered, is worse than saying nothing, because the word does the same work against you.
Anthropiceven ran a television ad called 'There's Hope in Hard Questions' that opened on a burning house, cut to a crowd being scanned by facial recognition, a person sleeping on a city street, and rows of tombstones — imagery that, whatever the intent, reinforced the very anxieties the company sought to calm.
CEO Times take: The free market does not reward companies that frighten their own customers. Amodei built a credible enterprise product and a serious research operation — the kind of disciplined, private-sector approach to a hard problem that deserves respect. But brand strategy is not safety policy, and conflating the two is costing Anthropic in the court of public opinion. Capital flows toward clarity and confidence. If Anthropic wants mainstream adoption, the lesson from 30,000 feet is simple: show people where you are going, not what could go wrong on the way.
