A venture communications chief has warned that the AI industry's habit of marketing its own existential danger — what critic Cal Newport calls "doom trolling" — has spent down its credibility to the point where genuine safety warnings now read as sales pitches.

Gabriel De La Rosa Cols, venture partner and head of communications at Add Ventures Capital, made the argument in an essay for PR Daily. His trigger: the resignation of Jacob Coxon from Anthropic, who, after three years at OpenAI and Anthropic, accused both companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon then added a line that stopped De La Rosa Cols cold: "This is not a marketing stunt."

"I don't believe him. Or, more precisely, I no longer know why I should," De La Rosa Cols wrote.

The blame, he argues, sits with a communications strategy the AI industry has refined for years: telling the public the product may destroy jobs, destabilize society or kill everyone — then acting surprised when audiences suspect the apocalypse is part of the media plan. Newport, writing in The New York Times, labeled the pattern "doom trolling": hype through pessimism. Instead of claiming your product will change the world, you claim it may end it.

The commercial logic is blunt, De La Rosa Cols says. If AI can eliminate millions of jobs, it must be powerful. If it can destabilize civilization, the company building it must be important. If it can wipe out humanity, "imagine what it can do for your Excel spreadsheet."

For communicators, he frames the core problem as arithmetic. "Credibility is not infinite. Every grandiose claim is a withdrawal. Eventually the account is empty." So when someone like Coxon issues a sincere warning, the audience has already been trained to hear a pitch.

Tech critic and PR professional Ed Zitron captured the dynamic in a response to Coxon: "the biggest sign that something is a marketing stunt is when someone says that." De La Rosa Cols calls the line devastating. "'This is not marketing' only becomes necessary after marketing has made truth indistinguishable from a stunt."

He sees the same self-mythologizing in Sam Altman's public framing. The New Yorker reported this year that Altman has repeatedly compared himself and OpenAI's mission to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. At some point, De La Rosa Cols writes, the analogy stops sounding historical and starts looking narcissistic — "software that occasionally invents court cases" placed in the moral universe of the atomic bomb.

The mythology serves a purpose, he argues. Useful software is boring. Useful does not justify breathless headlines or trillion-dollar expectations — a reference to reported OpenAI funding talk at a $12 trillion valuation ahead of a potential IPO. The technology has to be "inevitable. Transformative. Civilizational. Possibly lethal."

The same formula drives what he calls the "jobpocalypse." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years and push unemployment to 10% to 20%. "'New software may improve productivity' is terrible copy. 'Your children may never have jobs' is much better," he writes.

His prescription for the profession is direct. Communicators should ask what they are optimizing for: "If the answer is attention, doom trolling works brilliantly. If the answer is trust, it is a disaster." The first warning scares people; the tenth makes them skeptical; "the hundredth makes them think, just kill us already."

He also rejects the notion that danger itself sells. If a bank bragged that its new risk engine might collapse the global economy, no one would call it impressive technology. They would move their money.

The stakes extend beyond AI firms, De La Rosa Cols argues. Public relations has spent decades escaping the caricature of the spin doctor, only to watch one of the world's most important industries adopt a strategy that appears to announce manipulation while swapping optimism for existential dread. "We should be the people in the room saying no," he writes.

The honest story is strong enough, he contends: LLMs can write, code, summarize, translate, analyze information and automate parts of knowledge work at astonishing speed, while remaining unreliable, prone to hallucinations and dependent on human judgment. "That is not a weak story. It is an honest one."

His closing warning cuts at the industry's own logic: Coxon may well be sincere — and the fact that sincerity now sounds like marketing "should terrify AI companies more than another Terminator scenario." The best PR builds trust through honesty, empathy and respect for the audience's intelligence. "If the truth is not exciting enough, that is a messaging problem, not an excuse to manufacture an apocalypse."