What Anthropic’s Dario Amodei can learn from the airline industry’s painful lesson about marketing and the concept of safety

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei believes AI carries big potential risks, and he keeps talking about them.

He also has tried to position Anthropic as the AI company most committed to building AI safely.

But that might be part of the problem.

He told Fortune previously , “AI safety continues to be the highest-level focus,” and that safety-first positioning is what’s given corporate buyers assurance its models are less risky than those from other competitors.

He and sister Daniela even split from OpenAI in 2021 due in part to differences over its approach to safety.

He has also raised concerns about autonomous weapons and AI surveillance with the Pentagon.

Still, the public remains deeply skeptical.

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 numbers are even 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, even as use keeps climbing.

In a lengthy X post recently, Amodei—who rarely goes on social media so the post in itself was unusual—said he’s written one major essay on AI’s risks and one on its benefits.

He wrote that negative public perceptions of AI were not due to his, or any other AI CEO’s, comments about AI risks, but rather because the AI industry had not yet delivered enough of the positive benefits it has claimed AI can bring, such as curing human diseases.

But while Amodei is trying to reassure the public about AI, he keeps associating Anthropic with “safety” in a regard that implies the whole AI industry is unsafe.

Amodei is falling into a trap PR agencies have known for decades: the problem of association.