n this talk I will present some recent results on instabilities of anti-de Sitter flux compactifications in effective field theories arising from non-supersymmetric string models, namely the USp(32) and U(32) orientifold models and the SO(16) x SO(16) heterotic string. We focus on non-perturbative instabilities, framing the vacua in terms of brane stacks, analyzing their back-reacted geometry and reproducing AdS its near-horizon limit.