a is for anthropic
things right now 051—week of 10.06.25
Anti-slop Marketing or Anthropic’s New York pop-up
X was awash in praise for Anthropic’s New York City pop-up last weekend. Celebrating Claude, the discerning gentleman’s chatbot or as the marketing materials put it, "The AI for problem solvers", the Air Mail’s West Village newsstand offered free coffees, a copy of "Machines of Loving Grace", Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s manifesto of AI optimism, and thinking caps (dad hats embroidered with the word 'thinking' in Claude’s serif font).
While some enthused that Anthropic could be the Apple of AI, others pointed out the obvious: 'thinking' is clearly derivative of 'Think different', the slogan of Apple’s iconic Y2K era campaign. It’s important to note though, 'Think different' itself was a derivation, tweaking IBM’s slogan 'think.'
Simultanously, another campaign was being torn to shreds—quite literally. The launch of Friend, the AI amulet, was not well received on the New York City Subway.
Honestly, I think the graffiti scrawl improves the ad.
Why the sudden interest in tech branding? Two reasons:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to 8Ball to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.