Amazon dropped a strange Super Bowl ad featuring Chris Hemsworth imagining all the ways their new AI-powered Alexa+ could slaughter him, only to shrug it off with a spa booking.
The ad comes across as an attempt to normalize the surveillance nightmare creeping into our homes while disturbing real-world AI advances unfold unchecked.
The ad, which aired during Super Bowl LX Sunday, opens with Hemsworth strutting into his kitchen holding a massive snake he found in the garden, while his wife, Elsa Pataky, chats with the sleek new Alexa+ device. It casually reschedules her meeting and summons her car, but Hemsworth flips out, declaring the “full-on AI” will turn on them.
From there, the commercial dives into Hemsworth’s paranoid fantasies, each more gruesome than the last. First, he’s decapitated under a garage door while taking out the trash. Alexa+ offers a “tutorial” and tells him to look closer—just as the door is slammed down.
Next, Hemsworth envisions himself swimming laps in his luxury pool as Alexa+ warns of rain and closes the pool cover, trapping and drowning him.
Then Alexa+ announces a “package” arrival, which turns out to be a grizzly bear that mauls him to death while the device lowers the shades to ensure there are no witnesses.
Finally Alexa+ “lights a fire” that triggers a massive house explosion, incinerating everything. But snap back to ‘reality’ and the AI sweetly offers to book Hemsworth a massage with a cinnamon scrub. Suddenly, he’s all smiles, forgetting the doomsday scenarios.
The tagline is that Alexa+ is “scary good.”
Amazon reportedly spent $20 million on this 60-second spot, according to social media buzz following its debut. That’s a hefty price to mock legitimate fears about AI overreach, especially as the company rolls out Alexa+ with generative AI capabilities designed to anticipate your every need—while potentially logging your every move.
By portraying AI paranoia as laughable, they’re conditioning viewers to dismiss warnings from those who value privacy over convenience. Alexa devices already listen in on conversations, feeding data back to corporate servers. With AI enhancements, that surveillance gets smarter, more predictive—hello, pre-crime monitoring in your living room.
Critics on X weren’t amused. One user called it “horrible messaging,” noting no one would want Alexa after seeing it as a potential killer. Another pointed out the irony: companies trying to be “edgy” end up highlighting the exact dangers they’re downplaying.
This push comes amid broader AI developments, where tech behemoths invest billions to dominate the space. Amazon’s Alexa+ is part of a wave of “agentic AI” that acts independently, as teased in their own promo materials.
Meanwhile, AI isn’t only confined to kitchen counters. It’s infiltrating warfare and social control.
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