Anthropic’s Inviting Hard Questions, a new ad for Claude has no punchline or dig at a rival unlike last time. It is just a film of real people asking real, uneasy questions about AI: Who decides the rules for this technology? Can it give my children a better future? Does it make the world more dangerous? Can it help cure diseases?
The idea is simple. Anthropic is asking the public to send in the toughest questions they have about AI, and it is promising to publicly track what it does in response.
The company frames this as an extension of work it says it has already been doing quietly: a survey of 52,000 Americans called the Anthropic Public Record, interviews with 81,000 Claude users across 159 countries, in-person focus groups, and ongoing research into how people actually use the model. The pitch is that a company built as a Public Benefit Corporation owes the public more than a product launch. It owes an account of itself.
It is a low key film for a company that spent the first half of the year making a lot of noise.
From Super Bowl mockery to Cannes gold
To understand why this ad feels different, it helps to rewind to February. That is when Anthropic made its Super Bowl debut with A Time and a Place, created by the agency Mother and directed by Jeff Low through Biscuit Filmworks. The campaign had jokes, a Dr Dre needle drop, and a clear target: OpenAI, which had just announced it would start showing ads inside ChatGPT.
The films imagined a near future where a chatbot’s helpful answer suddenly turns into a sponsored pitch. In one spot, a man asks how to communicate better with his mother and gets solid advice, until the bot pivots into recommending a dating site for “mature women.”
In another, a guy at an outdoor gym asks how to get a six pack and is told to buy shoe insoles that add an inch of height. The tag line heard both times: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” The campaign went on to sweep Cannes Lions in June 2026, picking up two Film Grand Prix, Gold and Silver Lions, and a Silver in Creative Strategy.
The hearbeat between February’s campaign and July’s, one is comedy, the other is closer to a listening exercise, runs on the same beat: that Anthropic’s real differentiator is not raw model capability but trust.
Has Claude advertised in India?
Not yet. Anthropic’s brand spending so far, the Super Bowl push, the Mother-led Keep Thinking and now Hard Questions, has been aimed largely at US and international broadcast and digital audiences. There is no India specific Claude campaign on the scale of what its two big rivals are running.
That gap is notable because both OpenAI and Google have gone all in on India this year, and both have used majorly cricket to do it.
OpenAI launched Everyday Superheroes in April, timed to the IPL, built around seven films shot in different IPL home cities, each showing someone solving a real, small problem with ChatGPT.
Google has matched that energy with Gemini. It signed a Rs 270 crore, three-year sponsorship with the BCCI ahead of IPL 2026, and was named the Official AI Fan Companion for the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, alongside Pixel as Official Smartphone.
It went a step further than sponsorship boards. As IPL 2026’s official AI partner, it rolled out A Perfect Match, a six-part micro drama starring Ishaan Khatter and Sara Arjun, written by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s banner Tiger Baby Films. Each episode folds in a moment where one of them turns to Google’s AI Search to settle a cricket argument.
Perplexity has taken a scrappier route to the same audience: creator collaborations rather than star vehicles.
Read: When Perplexity saved the Rebel Kid in Mykonos
It started with Apoorva Mukhija, the content creator known as The Rebel Kid, who posted about using Perplexity to get quick medical guidance after cutting her leg on broken glass at a club in Mykonos, in a video tied to an Airtel offer of a free year of Perplexity Pro.
That was followed by a spot with CarryMinati, one of India’s biggest YouTubers, in which he plays a Gen Z student baffling Delhi University professor Vijender Chauhan (Masijeevi) with slang like “rizz” and “aura farming,” then pulls out Perplexity to define “boomer” in Hindi when the coach turns the joke back on him.
OpenAI is buying IPL scale and mass reach. Google is spending on cinematic star power and narrative product placement through Tiger Baby. Perplexity is betting on creator culture and virality over production value.
Will Claude follow suit? Best ask it than anyone else.