Keep Thinking with Claude
A couple of months ago, Anthropic came out with an ad for Claude – Keep Thinking. It was made by Mother, a London-based ad agency, and it’s a real banger. Great music, great style, pacey, and a great tagline.
It’s a pitch for AI as a helpful assistant, not your replacement. It makes you feel warmer and fuzzier, more positive about a world with AI working by your side to get things done and bring your ideas into being.
(To be clear I think this is the kind of misdirection that companies want; to get you to have warm fuzzies about their product. But it really does feel like Claude has a distinctly human flavour that other frontier AI companies haven’t managed to copy.)
I’ve assembled the script from the ad below – I love it enough to have screenshotted the best parts and written out a description of each scene. But this is only like half the shots. It’s incredibly densely packed with scenes of people coding, building things, doing research, being in the real world. In fact the coding per se is sort of a sideshow; it’s what people do with the things they code that’s emphasised.
The ‘problem’ sequence comes first. Rapidly-cut shots with things going wrong, people in distress, an ambulance wailing through the city, mass blackouts. Text overlays feel like they’re projected onto the scene rather than just displayed on top of it. It comes to a crescendo as a piano is dropped from a great height and splinters.
Then a pause – and the voiceover cuts in: “there’s never been a better time.” We shift to solutions, with scenes of people using Claude for various things: launching a rocket, tracking athletes’ performance, making music, climbing, dancing, exploring. “There’s never been a better time… to have no qualifications, no resources” pitches AI as a democratising tool, a lever by which people can lift themselves up, not merely a coding or productivity tool. Which is unusual: in the news, AI is mostly shown as a threat, either to humanity or to everyone’s jobs, or as a passing fad on which way too much money is being spent11. I’ve chosen not to engage with the safety piece in this post. I do think that the threat from misaligned AI is very serious, and that companies like Anthropic are making the world more dangerous by pushing the frontier. And this ad is basically safetywashing (or inspirationwashing, or whatever). A topic for another piece..
The ad is shot on film, in dozens of different locations with different actors in nearly every scene, graded to push warm oranges forward against muted greens and blues. Compare this to using ChatGPT – a wholly grayscale interface, a much colder, more corporate-futurist feel. (Ironic given Anthropic’s revenue comes almost entirely from companies using Claude and Claude Code.) When the ad shifts to focusing on solutions, the piano shot runs in reverse, the aspect ratio opens up, everything warms up.
There’s a motif of graphics being overlaid on live action shots; they feel like they sit inside the world rather than code being separate from it. There’s a real attempt to tie Claude’s output to things in the real world, not just programs running on a computer.
The ad gives the sense of Claude as a bicycle for the mind and not just a coding tool. It’s quite inspiring to see programming being presented as a tool to do things in the world. Even the strapline – Keep thinking – pushes the idea that AI is your friendly assistant to help you get shit done in the world while you do the human bit, the thinking. It’s a nice counterpoint to the general sentiment of ‘everything is getting worse’ which pervades a lot of discourse.
It reminds me of the ending of Learn Python the Hard Way, where Zed Shaw emphasises that when non-programmers learn to code – doctors, historians, artists – that’s where the interesting stuff happens, at the interstices between disciplines. It’s no coincidence that Claude Code and other agentic coding tools have made programming more accessible to non-programmers than ever.
Keep thinking!
The ad opens with a repeating voiceover: PROBLEM/There’s never been a worse time. It loops over a series of short clips – a man staring out a window, a man standing by a sign reading Department of Problems, a pressure vessel with the label ECHO CHAMBER OF INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS, a man tunelessly trying to tune a piano, a typewriter feed with “Prob_ems” typed on the page. A cacophony of sound builds. A man in his dressing gown stands on his front lawn, screaming, which gets louder as we see a wide shot of a piano being dropped from a great height onto a city street and smashing.
There’s a pause. VO: “There’s… never been a better time”. The piano clip plays in reverse, the smashed piano reassembling and flying into the air.
Music starts: an instrumental version of All Caps by MF DOOM.
VO: “There’s never been a better time… a better time to have a problem.” A woman is speaking to Claude using speech-to-text. A clip of two people, one with a hearing aid, working in a bike workshop.
“…to be stuck…” Clip of a boy playing chess, shot from underneath a clear chessboard.
“…to be overwhelmed…” Clip of a man in a suit on the floor, surrounded by sheet music which he is marking up in front of his laptop. Looks like the man who was tuning the piano earlier.
“…to be impatient…” A team of three people of varying ages working in a tech lab, soldering and building something, with a rocket simulation in a Claude artifact. A shot of a woman outdoors shooting photos at golden hour. A simulation of a bubble chamber.
“…to be out of ideas…” An action shot of a man stepping towards a canvas and painting it with a flourish.
“…or out of your depth…” A shot of a boat with a man in scuba gear diving off, and a Claude artifact of ‘3D Kelp Analysis’.
“…out of breath.” Two people running in the desert followed by a chase car. A shot from inside the chase car where someone is running an athlete performance analysis on a laptop.
“There’s never been a better time to have a medical condition; just look at the research being done.” A shot from a hospital radiography room with the lights turning on, slices of a head MRI, a sepia-toned shot of an old man wearing an EEG cap.
“To have no qualifications, no resources.” Shots of a band playing, a group of people coding with Claude Code, a sound engineer surrounded by equipment, the team from earlier launching their rocket with telemetry superimposed on the frame.
“To not understand, feel insignificant…” Shots of a child talking to someone offscreen with a Claude artifact showing various shapes and volumes, a shot of a sign in the desert saying “UNIVERSE CLOSED / USE RAINBOW”, a woman touching a curtain of constellations above her, a woman in a brutalist building going up in the elevator.
“To feel restless…” Shot of a woman doing contemporary dance with something like motion capture superimposed on the frame, a man standing in his home office moving energetically, someone climbing a rockface with climbing routes superimposed.
“Right now there really has never been a better time.” Various shots of people looking… relieved? inspired? and then more shots superimposed with Keep researching/Keep learning/Keep coding and then the tagline: Keep thinking.
Then various shots showing a stream of floating through different scenes: a flock of starlings, a man outside a building, a man conducting an orchestra, two people coding in an aquarium, the sound engineer from before rotating his chair away from his desk.