Anthropic, Perplexity pay campus ambassadors as students sour on AI

The AI industry has responded to campus skepticism with the oldest playbook in consumer marketing, according to NBC News: pay the popular kids. NBC reports that as some students sour on AI, companies are recruiting their classmates as paid ambassadors to promote products on college campuses around the world, with Anthropic and Perplexity among the firms named in the reporting.

The sales problem those ambassadors are being paid to solve is real. NBC quotes Zoe Kaufman, a recent Mary Baldwin University psychology graduate, saying "I just feel this general sense among all of us of AI kind of being forced on us." Her school, she says, is "encouraging us to download different AIs and use them, and it just feels like it's kind of coming for everyone's jobs, just at different paces." That is not the framing a growth team at Claude or Perplexity wants shaping the next few years of habit formation among undergraduates.

The counter-message the companies are underwriting is the one you would expect. Anthropic, per NBC, funds campus clubs meant to build ties with "students who see AI as a tool for expanding human capability, not replacing it." That reframing is doing quiet work: agency-adding rather than job-taking, delivered through a peer rather than a press release. Peer-led marketing tends to outperform ad spend precisely because it does not read as marketing, which is also why it collapses hardest when the money behind it is exposed.

The honest caveat is that this is a trend read, not a data drop. NBC does not tell you what share of students are actually souring versus quietly signing up, how ambassador conversion is being measured, or whether the skepticism translates into fewer paid subscriptions or just louder discourse. Take the vibe as reported, not the size of the shift as settled. OpenAI's campus posture, notably, is not part of the frame.

The near-term read for AI leaders is more prosaic than "students are revolting." Whoever locks in defaults on campus over the next couple of hiring cycles gets a foothold in early-career workflows that is hard to dislodge later, and the fact that Anthropic and Perplexity are already spending on it suggests they know it.