Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei believes AI carries significant risks, and he continues to speak publicly about them. He has also tried to position Anthropic as the AI company most committed to building AI safely. That, however, may be part of the problem.

In a previous interview with Fortune, Amodei said, “AI safety continues to be the highest-level focus,” and that safety-first positioning has given corporate buyers confidence that Anthropic’s models are less risky than those of competitors.

Amodei and his sister Daniela also split from OpenAI in 2021, in part because of differences over its approach to safety. He has also raised concerns about autonomous weapons and AI surveillance with the Pentagon.

Even so, 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 continues to rise.

In a lengthy recent X post, Amodei — who rarely uses social media, making the post unusual — said he had written one major essay on AI’s risks and another on its benefits. He argued that negative public perceptions of AI were not caused by him or by other AI CEOs talking about risks, but rather by the industry’s failure to deliver enough of the benefits it has promised, such as curing human diseases.

But while Amodei is trying to reassure the public about AI, he keeps associating Anthropic with “safety” in a way that implies the broader AI industry is unsafe. In doing so, he may be falling into a trap PR agencies have known for decades: the problem of association.

The airline industry’s rebuke

The airline industry learned long ago not to associate itself with the word “safety” in marketing materials. Safety did not disappear from air travel, but it moved out of advertising and into mandatory in-flight briefings, which airlines have spent years turning into short films and songs rather than solemn warnings.

That is because even a legally required safety demonstration often reads better as entertainment than as a reminder. Safety leaves people with a bad taste; it is not something most people want to think about before a flight.

Historian Richard Popp’s research on airline advertising found that by the 1930s, carriers were already following a set of unwritten rules designed to keep any hint of danger out of the picture entirely. Ads were not supposed to show mountains, night flying, large bodies of water, or maintenance work, because each image risked evoking the possibility of a crash before anyone said a word about safety.

Despite that taboo, Pan Am spent the 1980s running its own reassurance campaign amid a wave of hijacking and bombing threats against transatlantic flights, insisting on its safety and security even as the threats mounted.

Then, in December 1988, a bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Aviation security expert Glen Winn said that disaster finally convinced the entire industry to retire the word “safe” for good.

What Dario can learn

The airline industry discovered that stating a fear about yourself is worse than saying nothing, because the word does the same work against you. Linguist George Lakoff’s 2004 book Don’t Think of an Elephant describes the same dynamic: telling someone not to think of an elephant requires them to picture the elephant first, and the instruction not to think about it does nothing to remove the image.

When Amodei created a Responsible Scaling Policy modeled on biosafety tiers and issued public warnings about AI risk and job losses, it resonated with an audience made up largely of engineers, safety researchers, enterprise buyers, and investors who view Anthropic’s concern about “catastrophic risk” as diligence.

But that audience was arguably already inclined to trust Anthropic’s motives, so the danger imagery did not attach to the company in the same way it might have elsewhere. Now, Amodei’s strategy of directly addressing concerns may be pushing users of AI away from it.

When Anthropic ran a television ad titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” it opened on a burning house, then cut to a crowd being scanned by facial recognition, a person sleeping on a city street, and rows of tombstones in an image that resembled a national cemetery, all under a voiceover asking questions such as “Can AI be trusted?”

After seeing the ad, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “i thought this was satire,” mistaking it for a parody. For a general audience, the message that likely stuck was not that Anthropic is the only AI company willing to grapple honestly with AI’s biggest risks, but that all AI companies, including Anthropic, were ushering in a dystopian future.

That is the lesson airlines learned about selling safety. It is one the AI industry may need to relearn today.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com