“Thinking” caps are dotting the West Village — and no, it’s not the merchandise for a new René Descartes fan club.
The baseball caps come from Anthropic, which hosted a buzzy pop-up with the Air Mail newsstand.
OpenAI handed out coveted token plaques at its Dev Day; Cursor gifted some of its most loyal supporters with “tab” keys.
AI itself is known for its bigness — it’s in the name, large language model. On the ground, techies are going small. AI heads are crawling for exclusive, small-batch merchandise to flaunt on X and show just how inner circle they are.
As AI merch booms, it’s clearer than ever that these companies — both massive foundation model companies and startups — have hit the mainstream. These days, AI status symbols are popping up everywhere.
The AI apparel boom
Anthropic fans could pick up a free tote bag, “thinking” cap, and copy of Dario Amodei’s book — if they were willing to wait in line.
In early October, Anthropic partnered with Graydon Carter’s Air Mail newsstand for a Claude-themed pop-up. The baseball caps quickly went viral, sending hordes of fans to the shop. Eventually, the organizers ran out.
Sunita Mohanty was one of the lucky few to score a cap. The San Francisco-based cofounder of AI healthcare startup Vibrant Practice was on a trip to New York for some meetings when she saw the Claude team’s post on social media.
“It was super packed, and it was clearly all sorts of engineers and builders and startup folks,” Mohanty said. Several attendees looked like they had come with their teams from work, she said, and all were wearing the matching caps.