Good morning. Today, marketing combines with a cultural moment to pitch male-fertility supplements and sperm-testing kits.

Wellness brands are seizing the growing fixation on sperm health to fuel sales for male-fertility products, Sara Ashley O’Brien reports for the Journal.

• SwimClub, a new male fertility-supplement company, markets to both men and women. “You can’t out-ovulate bad sperm,” reads one ad.
• Companies like Bird&Be, FullWell and Needed are promoting supplement packs for him and her. “Dean and I started taking the Baby Making Bundle from Perelel so we can get ahead together,” reads a sponsored post from Caelynn Bell, an influencer and a former contestant on “The Bachelor.”
• And a startup called Sperm Racing is taking preorders for a gummy supplement called Sperm Worms, with plans to introduce other sperm-health products like underwear. Last year it held a “sperm race” at the Hollywood Palladium that pitted men’s sperm samples against each other on a microscopic racetrack.

I asked Sara for more on the brands’ strategies—and where this is going.

Not counting the Sperm Worms guys, male-fertility products seem like they’re getting marketed to women as much as men. Should I be surprised?

Sara: Many of the companies have a similar message: It takes two. They’re leveraging the fact that many women are already taking a number of steps ahead of trying to conceive. They’re improving their diets, switching up their products and starting a prenatal supplement. The brands are driving home that men are half the equation of successfully conceiving. So, the logic goes, they need to be following suit and—of course—buying products, too. With that sort of messaging, you can market to both women and men in one ad.

Where does all this go next?

Sara: For so long, the burden of fertility struggles has fallen on women. Two of the men I interviewed for this article had a similar story. It took a second IVF doctor—not the first one they saw and went through an IVF cycle with—to point out the male factor challenges that were resulting in their difficulties getting pregnant.

All this conversation will hopefully lead to more attention being paid to both partners in a couple. More questions asked earlier on, more data in the form of testing, and more answers.

AI companies are striving to put forward a simpler, more reassuring message than they often have in the past, Bradley Olson and Sam Schechner write in The Journal: “We come in peace.”

OpenAI for example just proposed a list of populist proposals to address worries like massive job losses, floating ideas like a four-day workweek and an AI-invested public-wealth fund for citizens.

And Anthropic has been signing partnerships and building tools for sectors such as consulting and software that seem at risk of replacement by AI.

An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company is trying to be proactive. “That means coming to the table with real solutions that are as transformative as the underlying technology,” she said.

To me, the wildest move along these lines might be Anthropic’s word yesterday that it’s withholding its new model from the public because it’s so good it’s dangerous. 

Here’s Robert McMillan:

Instead, Anthropic is making a Mythos preview available to about 50 players key to critical infrastructure so they can try to prepare for a day when AI easily identifies and attacks vulnerabilities.

“We basically need to start, right now, preparing for a world where there is zero lag between discovery and exploitation,” Graham said.

That’s great, and undoubtedly sincere. But it seems like AI companies’ professions of peace might struggle to shake a footnote: “Also, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Was that too much? Blame Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who published an essay in January warning that AI’s risks include widespread job losses, bioterror and “a global totalitarian dictatorship.” Those risks can be managed, he wrote, but first, “Humanity needs to wake up.”

The AI charm offensive is also up against a long history of pop-culture paranoia over sentient machines. It’s not just “The Terminator” either; check out this preview for another 1984 release, “Electric Dreams,” in which AI is achieved by dousing a PC with champagne.

I may have seen it too young.

American Honda moved Acura’s creative account to RPA after 12 years at MullenLowe, which Omnicom dissolved into TBWA. [Ad Age]

Dirty soda has made it big on store shelves with the arrival of Dirty Mountain Dew at retailers across the country. [Beverage Industry]

Kroger is adding its near-expired food to Flashfood, an app that helps grocers sell produce, meat and dairy approaching the best-by date. [Modern Retail]

Khartoon Weiss, TikTok’s lead for its ad business in North America, is leaving after nearly six years at the company. [BI] 

Trade Desk CMO Ian Colley is stepping down. [Adweek] 

Greece plans to ban social media for children under the age of 15 starting next year. [WSJ]