Anthropic, the artificial intelligence powerhouse, hosts pop-up cafes around the world that give away faded, limited-edition baseball hats that say “thinking.” They became hot items on eBay.

Figma, the design software maker, releases its shoppable gear, created in collaboration with hip brands like Dinner Service, in limited runs it calls “seasons.”

Palantir has its much-discussed $239 chore coat, a marketing stunt that is designed to transform the controversial government contractor into a lifestyle brand.

And last month, OpenAI revealed Supply Co., its shop for branded gear, including an embroidered half-zip sweater ($175), a pair of bright blue crew socks ($15) and a tie-dyed ChatGPT basketball ($70), promoted as “a physical reminder that creativity doesn’t just live on our screens.”

The tech industry’s new status-symbol merchandise — call it “corpcore” — is the most prominent sign yet of the industry’s newfound bid for taste and style.

Until recently, Silicon Valley upheld an image as a swagless place that celebrated its nerds and bros, and stuck to gray hoodies and Allbirds sneakers. That’s changing as tech companies replace their boring logo T-shirts — handed out by the boxload at conferences — with exclusive streetwear collaborations with niche designers sold in limited-edition drops.

“Historically, it was cool to signal you did not care,” said Thais Castello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, an A.I. start-up. “More and more, there has been this value around aesthetics and around quality and care and craft.”

It’s all part of tech’s new obsession with taste. If A.I. lets anyone create anything in seconds, the thinking goes, humans are no longer needed to write, or create code, or design things. Our only value in the modern marketplace will be to judge whether those things are good or bad. To have taste.

In this way, taste is less of a lens for appreciation of art than it is a résumé builder. Commentators have declared that taste is a new core skill and the only moat. Some young tech workers are even throwing taste-themed dinner parties.

To critics, tech’s fashionable shift is a way to co-opt the tactile aesthetics of craftsmanship at the very moment A.I. tools are replacing humans and producing a glut of digital slop. Some have called the tech companies’ embrace of artisan and designer swag “taste-washing.”

The backlash against A.I. spans age, race, class and political party. Will merch actually change the narrative?

Niv Dror, founder of the venture firm Shrug Capital, said he believed it could humanize the industry. He suggested tech-themed stores that carry all the cool new apparel and tchotchkes, as well as books by tech C.E.O.s and venture capitalists. “Why isn’t there a Nordstrom for tech?” Mr. Dror asked. Or even a whole mall?

“Tech will be better understood when people actually see it in culture,” he said.

‘Marketing Is Like Sex’

Silicon Valley once had a saying, popularized by the author Antonio García Martínez: “Marketing is like sex: Only losers pay for it.” In other words, good tech products sell themselves.

It’s no longer true in the age of A.I., when every company has a giant pile of cash and the competition is fierce, thanks to A.I. bots that can write code overnight. To stand out, tech companies have stepped up their marketing with slick launch videos, jargon-filled billboards and more creative ploys.

An A.I. software start-up called Monaco is spending $6,000 a day to fly a plane with a banner of its logo over San Francisco. The company’s founder, Sam Blond, said it was cheaper than renting a billboard on Highway 101 for a month. (Monaco also experimented with a mini-blimp.) Corgi, an A.I. insurance start-up, opened a 24-hour cafe in San Francisco’s financial district “for builders to gather at any hour of the day.” Nico Laqua, a Corgi co-founder, said the cafe helped the company with hiring.

Merch is a critical piece of the package, with companies teaming up with artisans or striking partnerships with hot designers. Limited-edition items, like OpenAI’s basketball, frequently sell out.

Fashion critics are not especially impressed. Jonah Weiner, a co-author of Blackbird Spyplane, a popular style newsletter, said the clothes felt designed by A.I.

“They look like this synthesis of merch design trends that hit peak popularity five to 10 years ago,” he said, with traces of mid-2010s streetwear, Kanye West tour merch and millennial direct-to-consumer branding. They do not convey any distinct sense of the culture of the companies they represent, he added.

“There is a little blankness to what they’re offering,” Mr. Weiner said.

Karine Hsu, who runs Slope, a branding agency for tech companies, bought OpenAI’s basketball, water bottle and bright blue hoodie, as well as an Nvidia sweater depicting the chipmaker’s founder, Jensen Huang. Some of her friends bought items from Palantir’s collection of tennis gear.

Ms. Hsu hasn’t worn the apparel and mostly views it as memorabilia. “It’s like a moment in time,” she said. “They’re trying to be culturally relevant.”

The A.I. companies’ own employees may even be hesitant to broadcast their affiliation. OpenAI has advised employees not to display their badges or wear clothing with its logo around the office when there is a heightened security risk, a company spokeswoman said.

‘Quality That Reveals Itself’

When the A.I. start-up Perplexity decided to make swag for its fans, its designers knew the items had to be “a bit more elevated,” said Jesse Dwyer, the company’s head of communications and marketing.

The resulting e-commerce shop, Perplexity Supply, carries framed artwork promoting Perplexity’s message of curiosity ($180); sweatshirts made of heavyweight cotton, featuring custom tags and embroidered logos ($58); and full-grain-leather “heirloom” journals with refillable pages, bound by eight solid brass rings ($129).

Perplexity Supply congratulates its shoppers for their good taste, describing its apparel as having “quality that reveals itself to the observant wearer.”

“There is a judgment and a taste involved in choosing one that’s the best,” Mr. Dwyer said. The company is not trying to make a profit on the store, he said. Around 10,000 people have bought items.

Perplexity’s notebooks come from Ugmonk, a Downingtown, Pa., company founded by Jeff Sheldon in 2008. Mr. Sheldon does not share the hypergrowth obsession of the tech industry; he has turned down several investment offers over the years.

Ugmonk’s website features a parable about a fisherman who is happy with his simple life catching just enough fish, and who eschews advice from a businessman suggesting he work longer, expand, go public and become a millionaire. Mr. Sheldon is not opposed to tech or A.I., he said, but his strategy is “the polar opposite of what A.I. is doing.”

“We’re doing the other version,” he said. “We’re slow, methodical, thoughtful, and A.I. is like slop, fast and crass and just, like, throw things at the wall.”

(The New York Times has sued Perplexity, OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)

Ugmonk also made 6,500 custom journals for Y Combinator, the famous start-up accelerator. Until recently, the program’s main swag item was a standard heather-gray T-shirt with its slogan on it. The shirts embodied the spartan, scrappy hacker spirit of Silicon Valley that put engineering ahead of beauty.

Eve Bouffard, Y Combinator’s head of design, persuaded her bosses to lean into the upscale merch trend because it felt intentional, “like someone sat down and thought about it a little bit,” she said. Perhaps, she mused, the notebooks could foster deeper connections among the founders, who could take notes on paper during meetings instead of staring at their screens.

Tech-Enabled Taste

Some in Silicon Valley are trying to give the A.I. bots and agents their own sense of taste. In June, Ms. Castello Branco announced that Taste Labs had raised $18.5 million with that mission. She founded the company after becoming concerned by the volume of low-quality A.I.-generated content flooding the web.

“I think we’re going to get used to it and think it’s normal, and I really don’t want that,” she said.

Taste Labs is starting with digital design. It contracted with 1,000 design experts and critics to help refine software that other A.I. companies can use to improve their systems by teaching them the difference between quality digital design and slop.

Teaching A.I. how to have taste won’t take away humans’ only remaining value in an A.I.-ified world, Ms. Castello Branco said. “The more you will see of this mass production of things, the more tastemakers matter,” she said.

One problem, though, is that taste is, well, a matter of taste. Ms. Castello Branco said her company wasn’t yet tackling the problem of personalizing A.I. tools to an individual’s preferences. For now, there is enough work teaching the technology Design 101.

“The bar is on the ground,” she said.