In a comical case of irony, Anthropic, a leading developer of artificial intelligence models, is asking applicants to its open job roles to certify that they will not use AI in the application process.
Anthropic develops Claude, a chatbot that is well-regarded for its friendly conversational tone and coding abilities. The company has raised nearly $11 billion in funding from deep-pocketed companies like Google and Amazon to compete against OpenAI in the race to artificial general intelligence, or an AI that can replace most humans for most tasks. It has more recently demoed the ability for Claude to take control of a user’s devices to complete tasks for them, a form of “agentic AI” that OpenAI has also been building.
For all the bluster and spin about how great AI chatbots have become, when push comes to shove, Anthropic apparently does not think it is good enough to entirely substitute for a human. “While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process,” the applications say. “We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.” The field was first noticed by open-source developer Simon Willison and reported by 404 Media.
Of course, someone has to develop the AI systems in the first place, so this makes sense. Computers on their own do not have characteristics intrinsic to humans, like agency or creativity. OpenAI’s Sora video generation model can make impressive videos, but a human still needs to use their taste to create something compelling and interesting to watch.
There is immense anxiety in the software engineering world that AI will replace engineering jobs, even if AI coding models still make a lot of mistakes. Proponents of AI argue that the technology will just make developers more efficient and therefore capable of developing even more programs that they would not have had the resources to build in the past. Skeptics, however, think that leaders of major companies will replace humans with AI even if they know it is not as good as a human, since labor is almost always the largest cost center in a company. Salesforce and Klarna have publicly touted that they have been able to replace customer service functions with chatbots, but we do not have a clear picture of what that really means, and how the experience compares to human-led support.
At least for now, Anthropic is not quite willing to put its money where its mouth is. When it comes to mission-critical tasks, the company still wants to know that a human can do all the work. How should other companies thinking about using AI interpret this?
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English (US) ·