OpenAI now commands 22% of all company-level AI coverage across 500 tier-one media outlets in 37 markets, more than five times the coverage of Anthropic (4%), according to Carma's 2026 'Hype, Hope or Harm? The Global Story of AI' report.
The study evaluated 12,000 articles published between January and December 2025.
Despite Anthropic's deliberate safety-first positioning and CEO Dario Amodei's framing of its LLM Claude as a risk-conscious alternative, the company's approach has not translated into substantial positive sentiment over other major AI players.. ChatGPT features in 36% of all global coverage, while DeepSeek ranks second at 19%. Google Gemini accounts for 11%, while Claude makes up just 4%.
At the leadership level, Sam Altman holds over a third (33%) of all AI leaders' share in media, followed by Elon Musk at 27%. Amodei trails the pack at 4%, behind Nvidia's Jensen Huang at 13%, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg at 9%, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella at 5%. CEOs as a group account for 43% of all top commentator groups in AI media coverage.
Media sentiment exaggerates AI fears
Optimism dominates AI media coverage overall, with positive sentiment accounting for more than half (57%) of all coverage in 2025. However, this optimism is event-driven and fails to sustain in between, spiking around model launches, major conferences, and large investment announcements.
Where media and audiences agree most closely is on fear and concern when it comes to AI. The report finds that the media overestimates positivity in a majority of markets, particularly in Western markets. Media trust signals are higher than audience-reported trust in almost 70% of markets surveyed. Media is broadly accurate at identifying where AI anxiety exists, the report notes, but overstates its intensity in more than half of the countries studied.
Trust and governance: Who is responsible?
The burden of accountability in AI is shifting away from governments and onto AI companies and their users. Several major storylines converged in February 2025, and the result was a fundamental shift in who the media holds responsible for AI's direction.
These events include DeepSeek triggering bans and geopolitical scrutiny, the Paris AI Summit and Europe's US$125 million (€109 billion) investment push, the highly public OpenAI-Musk power struggle, and a wave of AI misuse and criminal exploitation cases. This means that AI companies were no longer framed as innovators but as the primary custodians of risk.
Accuracy and reliability of outputs are the primary trust signal for the media, cited in 32% of trust-related coverage. This is followed by transparency (27%) and human oversight (14%). For audiences, safety and misuse prevention ranks first (28%), ahead of accuracy and reliability (24%), and transparency (22%).
Productivity applications dominate coverage
Content creation and editing ranks third (15%). Notably, it is also the strongest trigger of fear and anger in AI use case coverage, reflecting media anxieties around displacement, authenticity, and creative control. Customer service and personal assistants account for 13% of coverage, and information retrieval and summarisation for 10%.
Business confidence
Despite growing discussion of a potential burst of the AI bubble, investment coverage remains strongly positive. Some 69% of media coverage related to AI investment carries positive sentiment, higher than the overall figure (57%) for AI coverage. Meanwhile, the capital cited in coverage shows the massive scale of investment into AI. Europe plans to mobilise up to US$229 billion (€200 billion) in AI investment, while Saudi Arabia committed US$14.9 billion in AI infrastructure funding at LEAP25. In addition, Google is building a US$15 billion AI data hub in India.
In the computing and GPU space, Nvidia secured US$500 billion in AI chip bookings, making it the first company in history to reach a $5 trillion valuation. Notably, OpenAI closed a share sale to SoftBank at a US$500 billion valuation. The report states that more than 70% of all US venture capital funding is currently flowing into AI startups. This means that this massive financial concentration into AI has shifted its position from a speculative bet to an investment priority for institutional capital.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
