1014: Anthropic doesn’t use AI

"Anthropic doesn’t use AI." That was the eyebrow-raising claim from Sam McAllister, an employee at Anthropic, in response to a question about how the company made the promotional videos for its Claude Fable launch. The answer: no AI was involved. The videos were made entirely by hand, by extremely skilled animators, using source material from the Britannica Encyclopedia and internal teamwork. This moment kicks off a broader conversation on this episode of Syntax about the gap between what AI can do and what skilled humans still do better—whether in motion graphics, slide design, or video editing.

The craft behind the hype

Wes, Scott, and CJ dig into the fact that Anthropic’s own marketing materials are a showcase of human craft, not AI generation. The hosts contrast this with a secondary video from TheRock (who works on Claude Code), where he used Claude and Remotion to transcribe, cut, color-grade, and stitch together a video. The result? Wes calls it "not particularly good"—essentially a PowerPoint with overlaid transcript words, lacking the visual storytelling that makes a video compelling. Scott, who has a background in motion graphics, notes that the professional hand and "taste" (a word he uses reluctantly) are still irreplicable. The same dynamic plays out in slide decks at conferences: Scott describes how he built his own slides in React Three Fiber as a 3D so