AI companies want everyone to use AI. In fact, they often warn that if you don't AI, you'll get left behind, a penniless Luddite that no one will hire.
There may be only one area of modern life where the technorati might think it's bad to use AI. That's when you apply for a job at their company.
That's the situation at Anthropic, a leading AI lab run by a slew of early OpenAI researchers and executives.
Anthropic is hiring a lot right now. If you go to its career website and click on a job posting, you'll be asked to write a short essay on why you want to work for the startup. It's one of those really annoying job application hurdles — and a perfect task for Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude.
The problem is you can't use AI to apply.
"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," Anthropic wrote in a recent job posting for an economist. "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 AI startup has the same requirement on other job listings, including these technical roles below. Which, you know, will require a lot of AI use. Just not in the application:
- Machine learning systems engineer, encodings and tokenization.
- Model behavior architect, alignment fine-tuning.
- Research scientist/engineer, honesty.
For anyone applying to that third job, you better not cheat and use artificial intelligence! Gotta be honest for that role, in particular.
Why would an AI company not want people using its products like this? This technology is supposed to take over the world, revolutionizing every aspect of work and play. Why stop at job applications?
This is especially true for math and science boffins who usually do numbers best, not words. I asked Anthropic to explain this policy last week. OpenAI doesn't seem to have an AI ban like this, but I checked in with that AI firm, too. Neither responded.
'The pendulum is swinging'
I also asked Jose Guardado about this. He's a recruiter at the venture capital firm General Partnership who helps startup founders build engineering teams. This chap used to work at Google and Andreessen Horowitz, so he's a real (human) expert at this stuff.
"The pendulum is swinging more toward humanities and authentic human experiences," he said.
In a world where AI tools can write and check software code pretty well, it may not be the best strategy to hire an army of math whizzes who don't communicate with colleagues very well, or struggle to describe their plans in human languages, such as English.
Maybe you need a combination of skills now. So getting candidates to write a short essay, without the help of AI, is probably a good idea.
Guardado made the more obvious point, too: If candidates use AI to answer interview questions, you can't tell whether they'll be any good at the job.
"There are well-known instances of students using AI chatbots to cheat on tests, and others using similar technology to cheat on coding interviews," Guardado told me. "AI is circumventing the evaluation of human qualities and skill. So there's a bit of a backlash right now."
"So how do you find authentic measures of evaluation?" he added. "How can you truly get a measure of applicants?"
Banning AI like this is probably a better way, for now, Guardado said.
"It's ironic that the maker of Claude is at the forefront of this," he said of Anthropic. "Is it the best look for them, as a leading AI provider?"
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