Anthropic has finally joined the advertising fray. Its debut campaign, Keep thinking, is less about glossy slogans and more about staking a claim: Claude, its AI model, isn’t here to replace your brain, but to sharpen it.

Created in partnership with indie powerhouse Mother and backed by a multi-million-dollar spend, the campaign marks Anthropic’s first serious brand play after years of organic growth among developers and businesses.

Until now, Claude has spread by reputation, quietly becoming the go-to model for those knee-deep in code, research papers and product prototypes. Now Anthropic is making its pitch to a wider audience: if you’re the kind of person who can’t leave a puzzle unsolved, Claude is your perfect ally.

The campaign launches with a cinematic, Madvillain-soundtracked 90-second film (produced by Love Song) that flips the AI narrative on its head: yes, the world is full of problems, but that’s a good thing – if you’ve got the right tools. “While the world is full of them, there’s never been a better time to have a problem,” says Felix Richter, global chief creative officer at Mother. It’s a neat reframing of AI not as the villain in the story, but as a trusty sidekick.

Andrew Stirk, Anthropic’s head of brand marketing, is keen to position the campaign as both a manifesto and an invitation. “Keep thinking is a rallying cry to problem solvers everywhere – and a promise that what once felt impossible is now within reach. Claude is for those who see AI not as a shortcut, but as a thinking partner to take on their most meaningful challenges.”

The media rollout is ambitious to say the least, with premium placements across live sport, streamers Netflix and Hulu, legacy print titles such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and partnerships with creators and influencers identified as sharing the campaign’s ethos. OOH ads feature Anthropic researchers and even the team behind Poetry Camera, a viral Claude-powered art project built by non-coders.

For Anthropic, the positioning runs deep. The company was founded in 2021 by a breakaway group from OpenAI, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, with a mission to build powerful AI that doesn’t disregard safety concerns. Claude’s personality reflects that – it’s designed not to spit out easy answers, but to pause, push back, ask questions and reveal its reasoning in real time.

That self-imposed restraint seems to be working. Just two years ago, Anthropic had fewer than 1,000 business customers; now it counts over 300,000. In that context, Keep thinking feels more like a philosophy than a tagline: in Anthropic’s eyes, the future of AI belongs to the curious, restless problem solver.

anthropic.com