American Eagle counts new customers after Sydney Sweeney ad frenzy and shares soar

Shares of American Eagle Outfitters spiked 34% Thursday after the teen clothing retailer said the frenzy surrounding its Sydney Sweeney ad campaign drew new customers during its most recent quarter.

American Eagle rolled out its new new ad campaign starring 27-year-old actor over the summer. The fall denim campaign sparked a debate about race, Western beauty standards, and the backlash to “woke” American politics and culture.

Negative reactions centered on ads that used the word “genes” instead of “jeans” featuring the blonde-haired, blue-eyed actor known for the HBO series “Euphoria” and “White Lotus.”

But American Eagle did get noticed, executives said late Wednesday in a call after the Pittsburgh retailer posted second quarter earnings.

“We saw a record-breaking new customer acquisition and brand awareness cutting across age, demographics and genders,” said CEO Jay Schottenstein.

Traffic built up throughout the second quarter and continued into August, he said.

The company now expects comparable-store sales to rise by low single-digit percentages in the third and fourth quarters. The company withdrew its outlook for the year this spring citing volatility from the chaotic global economic situation. But it said Wednesday that same-store sales should be flat this year with the bump.

American Eagle did say that its brand also benefitted from a new ad campaign featuring newly engaged NFL star Travis Kelce.

American Eagle said the campaign was always about its clothing and not race when responding to criticism. A month later retail rival The Gap put out its own ad featuring girl group KATSEYE. That ad received some praise for its inclusivity.

Gap CEO Richard Dickson, speaking Thursday at a Goldman Sachs global retail conference in New York City, said its “Better in Denim” campaign received 400 million total views and in three days had more views than the brand’s four prior ads combined.

“I think when the industry creates campaigns that are talked about, it generates interest in the industry, ” Dickson said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Our current campaign, Better in Denim, is a great example of that.”

Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, wrote that the frenzy around the Sweeney campaign is something of a "tempest in a teacup.”

“While it generated strong reactions, it ultimately had no serious detrimental impact on sales,” he said. “Indeed, guidance for the second half points to improved momentum, supported by both the denim marketing and the ongoing Travis Kelce partnership.”

And attention from the Sweeney campaign doesn't seem to have hurt the brand.

“Regardless of the merits of the collaborations, making more noise is exactly what American Eagle needs to do to cut through and regain ground among consumers for whom it has slipped off the radar, Saunders explained.

For the second quarter, American Eagle's revenue dipped 1% to $1.28 billion.

Chief Marketing Officer Craig Brommers said Wednesday that the Sweeney ad campaign will continue.

“Sydney will be part of our team as we get into the back half of the year and we’ll be introducing new elements of the campaign as we continue forward,” he said.

Shares of American Eagle Outfitters Inc. are up 10% this year with the latest surge.

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—-AP Retail Writer Anne D'Innocenzio in New York contributed to this report.

A shopper walks by an ad featuring Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce outside an American Eagle Outfitters, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Shoppers walk by an ad featuring Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce outside an American Eagle Outfitters, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Shoppers enter an American Eagle Outfitters, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

An ad for jeans is seen at American Eagle Outfitters, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Shoppers walk by an American Eagle Outfitters, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Shoppers walk by an American Eagle Outfitters, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

A Sydney Sweeney jeans ad is seen as shoppers browse at an American Eagle Outfitters, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

FILE - People walk past a campaign poster starring Sydney Sweeney which is displayed at the American Eagle Outfitters store, Friday, Aug. 1, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)

SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 7, 2025--

Ant International, a leading global digital payment, digitisation, and financial technology provider, has won first place at the NeurIPS Competition of Fairness in AI Face Detection.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251207210856/en/

AI Fairness enhances Financial Security

Studies by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) show that many commercial facial recognition algorithms have significantly higher error rates for women and people of colour largely due to underrepresentation in datasets AI algorithms are trained on. Biased algorithms lead to unfair denials of service and create security vulnerabilities.

The competition at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, among the world’s most prestigious AI conferences, challenged participants to develop AI models that not only achieve high-utility performance but also demonstrate fairness across demographic subgroups such as gender, age, and skin tone. Ant International emerged first among over 2,100 submissions from 162 teams across the world at the competition. These teams were tasked to detect 1.2 million AI-generated face pictures of humans from different demographic groups.

By combining a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture with an internal "bias-detection" mechanism, Ant International's winning AI model trains competing neural sub-networks – one focused on spotting deepfakes, the other actively challenging it to ignore sensitive traits. This dynamic ensures the system learns to detect only genuine signs of manipulation, not demographic patterns. Trained on globally representative data including real-world payment fraud scenarios, the model delivers robust and equitable performance at scale.

“A biased AI is an insecure AI,” said Dr. Tianyi Zhang, General Manager of Risk Management and Cybersecurity at Ant International. “Our model’s fairness prevents exploitation from deepfakes and ensures reliable identity verification for all users, supporting our mission to deliver secure and inclusive financial services worldwide.”

Applications in Financial Services

Ant International is integrating the NeurIPS-winning technology directly into its payment and financial services to counter deepfake threats and ensure consistent customer experience globally.

Full-cycle security strategy to protect financial transactions

Ant International alongside its partners serve over 150 million merchants and 1.8 billion user accounts worldwide. These services include global wallet gateway Alipay+, merchant payment services Antom, inclusive finance and credit tech services Bettr and global account services WorldFirst.

Ant International has positioned AI security at the core of its operations. It has introduced the AI SHIELD, as a comprehensive, full-lifecycle foundational framework for risk management. Built on the AI Security Docker, this solution reduces risk of AI service vulnerabilities such as unauthorised access and data leakage by 90% through advanced assessment methods and running safeguards.

Risk-management solutions secured by AI SHIELD provide full-lifecycle protection of transactions at Ant International. These solutions protect businesses and users from deepfake attacks, frauds and scams. For instance, account protection solution Alipay+ EasySafePay 360 can reduce account takeover incidence for digital wallet payments by 90%.

About Ant International

With headquarters in Singapore and main operations across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, Ant International is a leading global digital payment, digitisation and financial technology provider. Through collaboration across the private and public sectors, our unified techfin platform supports financial institutions and merchants of all sizes to achieve inclusive growth through a comprehensive range of cutting-edge digital payment and financial services solutions. To learn more, please visit https://www.ant-intl.com/

Ant International’s solution takes top spot at the NeurIPS Competition of Fairness in AI Face Detection, emerging first among over 2,100 submissions from 162 teams globally.