To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant | WIREDSkip to main contentMenuSECURITYPOLITICSTHE BIG STORYBUSINESSSCIENCECULTUREREVIEWSMenuAccountAccountNewslettersSecurityPoliticsThe Big StoryBusinessScienceCultureReviewsChevronMoreExpandThe Big InterviewMagazineEventsWIRED InsiderWIRED ConsultingNewslettersPodcastsVideoLivestreamsMerchSearchSearchJoel KhaliliThe Big StoryMay 26, 2026 6:00 AMTo Land a Job in AI, Try Reading KantThe world’s leading AI labs are hiring philosophers to think through ethical edge cases and grand questions of mind and morality. Are they another instrument of hype?Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this story“It’s probably the best time to be a philosopher since Aristotle was hired as tutor to Alexander the Great,” says Henry Ajder, a philosophy postgraduate who advises the UK government and a slew of startups on artificial intelligence. He’s only half joking.Philosophers have never seemed like the most employable bunch. But AI, the same technology that’s expected to drive many other people out of work, has given new weight to the kinds of questions they’re trained to ask (and sometimes maybe even answer): What is intelligence? What is a mind? “You have philosophers from hundreds of years ago who thought about some of the same problems,” Ajder says. “Now they are becoming material.”Two of the foremost AI labs have recruited teams of in-house philosophers. “There are significantly more philosophers now—that’s a sound intuition,” says ethicist Iason Gabriel, who leads Google DeepMind’s team of research scientists specializing in the societal impact of AI. At Anthropic, resident philosopher Amanda Askell has become one of the company’s most recognizable faces. Both labs declined to disclose the number of philosophers they employ, citing company policy. WIRED counts at least 10 at DeepMind and four at Anthropic.As philosophers at the labs help to sculpt AI models, producing prominent work cited in hundreds of subsequent research papers, so too is AI shaping the philosophy curricula at eminent universities. Plenty now run AI ethics courses or joint programs in computer science and philosophy. “It’s the kind of flavor of the year,” says Edward Harcourt, professor of philosophy and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford.AI PanicTake this mandatory AI workplace training right now—or else.Yet in academia, some regard the philosophers working for the labs with a degree of suspicion. If a for-profit AI company signs your paycheck, might that compromise your research? By playing Aristotle to AI Alexander, do you risk your work becoming an instrument for hype-building and myth-making? “It’s quite good for the public perception of the tech companies if people are led to believe they are doing something incredibly unusual and incredibly powerful,” Harcourt says. “There is a self-aggrandizing aspect to encouraging that field of research.”When Iason Gabriel joined DeepMind nearly 10 years ago, the idea of AI as a moral actor, much less a conscious one, wasn’t really on the horizon. At the time, his focus was on issues like algorithmic bias. But with the advent of large language models in the early 2020s, Gabriel says, “we had an ability to encode a much richer set of values.”Today, AI agents are beginning to send emails, schedule appointments, and write code—to act in the world. Their behavior stands to affect not only the immediate user but other people too. That’s where Gabriel is focusing his research. “The thing that has now become a very rich area is this question of value alignment—essentially, what it means for the technology to be actively good,” he says. “It turns out that you can sink a lot of philosophical man-hours into trying to understand that.”There’s a magnetism to questions about consciousness and superintelligence, but philosophers working at the labs spend more of their time on far more immediate risks: around fairness, misinformation, malicious misuse, errant agents, and so on. “There is this interest in AI consciousness now,” says Gabriel. “But there, we’re more in evidence-collection mode.”Somewhere in the guts of DeepMind’s 180,000-square-foot office in central London, Julia Haas, a member of the company’s responsibility team, asks herself questions like: “What do I really want to understand about the models? What do I think is important? How do we measure for that? How do we frame those problems? How do we communicate them?”Haas is a philosopher of mind and, more specifically, a mechanist—someone concerned with the workings of minds. She has been at DeepMind for five years and recently coauthored a paper, published in Nature, that proposed a framework for testing whether LLMs exhibit moral competence. She and her colleagues are looking for the best way to distinguish moral competence from its hollow imitation, and asking how best to account for variances in moral values among people from drastically different cultures. Haas’ work is distant from the processes for training Google’s flagship model, Gemini, or packaging it into a public-facing chatbot. “I would think of it as very early in the pipeline,” she says.At Anthropic, philosophers are more directly involved in model development. “No startup hires a philosopher to do philosophy,” Askell says. After obtaining a philosophy PhD in 2018, Askell joined OpenAI in a policy role. Three years later, when a group of OpenAI staffers left to start Anthropic, she signed on as one of the earliest hires. One of Askell’s main responsibilities is to identify fringe cases where adhering to human behaviors might be inappropriate for models—say, when interacting with somebody in psychological distress—and propose ways of training out those quirks. That involves plenty of yakking with Claude, Anthropic’s flagship language model. She was the main drafter of Claude’s famed “constitution,” a lengthy document addressed directly to the model that stipulates how it should behave and what broad values it should uphold. “Writing the constitution was something that feels very much like applied philosophy,” says Askell. “Something that’s more like teaching a person to be good.”As she worked up the document, Askell worried about preparing for a “transitionary period” in which models begin to play a part in developing future iterations of themselves. In particular, she was leery of breeding “resentment” between models and their human creators. “If they are going to help us make that transition go well and I can give them a set of values to do that … that’s the core goal,” Askell says. “Ultimately, I want the models to reflect the best of us, to the best of our ability.”Among philosophers working in academia, there is broad agreement on the value of mapping the ethical risks posed by AI—the possibility it might be used to develop new weapons of mass destruction, undermine democracy, or entrench existing social iniquities. As for grander philosophical questions relating to AI and consciousness, mindedness, or superintelligence, reactions range from wariness to outright dismissal. “Trying to finely slice definitions of consciousness,” Harcourt argues, “is a waste of time.” These systems, he says, “are never going to be rivals to our version of minded life, not least because the specialness of humanity has got as much to do with warm bodies as it has to do with cognitive sophistication.”When a philosopher takes a job at an AI lab, Harcourt argues, “there’s a big risk of ethics-washing.” The concern is that they could effectively become an extension of the marketing function at the labs, their work outwardly performing a commitment to AI safety and signaling to the public that models have advanced to the point where serious people are asking questions about superintelligence and consciousness. David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at the Alan Turing Institute, says there is an “elective affinity” between philosophers who are willing to entertain the idea of an artificial mind and “the Big Tech executives who are the beneficiaries of hype.” To practice philosophy from inside a business is almost an oxymoron, Leslie argues. “You want to ask the big questions,” he says. “But if you’re a philosopher working for a big tech company, your problem space is delimited.”Even in a scenario where philosophers are given free rein by their employers, some academics question whether their findings would carry enough weight to divert the course of AI development if they happened to collide with competitive ambitions. For-profit AI companies are, of course, ultimately accountable to investors and shareholders. “I hope that these companies are genuinely guided by ethical considerations, at least partially,” says Alex Grzankowski, associate director at the Institute of Philosophy and director of the London AI and Humanity Project. “I definitely don’t have this rosy optimism that, now they are asking philosophers, it’s all going to be ethically beautiful. Nobody has that delusion.”The philosophers working at the labs say there is a logic to trading some academic independence for a front-row seat. Privileged access to the most sophisticated models before they’re released to the public, they argue, affords them a unique perspective on the questions worth asking and an advantage in teasing them apart. “To give good ethical input, you need access to good-quality information,” Gabriel says.A hope among philosophers, internal and external to the labs, is that profit incentive might frequently align with ethical conduct, even in the face of intense competition between rivals. There might be a scenario where ironing out sycophancy or publishing more information about how a model is trained, for example, might burnish a lab’s reputation and therefore its prospects in the market. “If you just felt marketing pressure but as a result made your models a lot better and made your whole process a lot more transparent, that’s great,” Askell says. “I’m glad you felt that pressure.”Ultimately, what you think about the value of philosophers on an AI lab payroll might boil down to a binary question: If it falls to a handful of corporations to preside over the development of a foundational technology, would you rather there be a philosopher in the room?Either way, they’re hiring. In April, DeepMind added to its ranks a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge, who will work on topics including machine consciousness and preparing for superintelligence. His new job title is, simply, “philosopher.”What Say You?Let us know what you think about this article in the comments below. Alternatively, you can submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].CommentsBack to topTriangleContinue Your AI EducationTake This Mandatory AI Workplace Training—or ElseMeet the Sad Wives of AICan Normies Really Vibe Code?Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AIA WIRED Fact-Checker Fact-Checks AIHow AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into ChaosIn your inbox: Will Knight’s AI Lab explores advances in AIJoel Khalili is a senior writer at WIRED, covering the artificial intelligence industry in Europe. He previously covered cryptocurrency extensively and was named one of the Professional Publishers Association’s 2024 most exciting rising stars in UK publishing. Before joining WIRED, he was an editor at TechRadar, where he wrote about ... Read MoreSenior WriterTopicslongreadsartificial intelligenceOpenAIAnthropicAI PanicRead MoreNick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’The philosopher thinks humans should pursue advanced AI and the promise of a “solved world.”Steven LevyFormer OpenAI Staffers Warn That xAI’s Poor Safety Record Could Complicate SpaceX’s IPOThe ex-employees, who cofounded a new AI watchdog group, say investors deserve more information about xAI’s safety practices before SpaceX goes public.Maxwell ZeffOverworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers FindIn a recent experiment, mistreated AI agents started grumbling about inequality and calling for collective bargaining rights.Will KnightMira Murati Wants Her AI to ‘Keep Humans in the Loop’The Thinking Machines Lab founder and former CTO of OpenAI tells WIRED she isn’t interested in automating people out of jobs. Instead, she’s building AI that can collaborate.Will KnightThe Man Behind AlphaGo Thinks AI Is Taking the Wrong PathDavid Silver has a new billion-dollar company that aims to build AI “superlearners.”Will KnightElon Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Has Used OpenAI’s Models to Train Its OwnWhile answering questions under oath, Musk argued it’s standard practice for AI labs to use their competitors’ models.Maxwell ZeffUsing AI for Just 10 Minutes Might Make You Lazy and Dumb, Study ShowsNew research suggests that reliance on AI assistants can have a negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem solve.Will KnightDemis Hassabis Thinks AI Job Cuts Are DumbThe CEO of Google DeepMind tells WIRED that companies should use the productivity gains of AI to do more, not lay people off.Will KnightThe Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover, Like It or NotWIRED spoke with Bloomberg’s chief technology officer about the big, chatbot-style changes coming to the iconic platform for traders.Joel KhaliliI Am Begging AI Companies to Stop Naming Features After Human ProcessesAnthropic announced “dreaming” for AI agents to sort through “memories” at its developer conference. Can we not?Reece RogersI've Covered Robots for Years. This One Is DifferentFrom sorting chicken nuggets to screwing in lightbulbs, Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment for the physical world.Will KnightGoogle DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI DealsUK staff of Google’s AI research lab hope to block the use of the company’s artificial intelligence models in military settings.Joel KhaliliWIRED is obsessed with what comes next. Through rigorous investigations and game-changing reporting, we tell stories that don’t just reflect the moment—they help create it. When you look back in 10, 20, even 50 years, WIRED will be the publication that led the story of the present, mapped the people, products, and ideas defining it, and explained how those forces forged the future. WIRED: For Future Reference.More From WIREDSubscribeNewslettersLivestreamsTravelFAQWIRED StaffWIRED EducationEditorial StandardsArchiveRSSSite MapAccessibility HelpReviews and GuidesReviewsBuying GuidesStreaming GuidesWearablesCouponsGift GuidesAdvertiseContact UsManage AccountJobsPress CenterCondé Nast StoreUser AgreementPrivacy PolicyYour California Privacy Rights© 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad ChoicesSelect international siteUnited StatesLargeChevronItaliaJapónCzech Republic & SlovakiaFacebookXPinterestYouTubeInstagramTiktok

The confluence of artificial intelligence development and philosophical inquiry is increasingly evident as leading AI laboratories are actively recruiting philosophers to navigate ethical edge cases and profound questions regarding mind and morality. This trend suggests that philosophers are becoming highly employable within the technology sector, prompted by AI’s capacity to materialize abstract philosophical problems. As noted by Henry Ajder, a philosophy postgraduate advising on artificial intelligence, the same fundamental questions pondered by thinkers from centuries past are now becoming material within the context of AI development.

This integration is reflected in major research institutions, with two prominent AI labs, DeepMind and Anthropic, having hired in-house philosophers. Iason Gabriel, who leads research for Google DeepMind’s societal impact team, points out that the emergence of large language models has created the ability to encode a richer set of values, shifting focus from concerns like algorithmic bias to the critical area of value alignment—determining what it means for technology to be actively good. This focus arises because AI agents are beginning to act in the world, necessitating a deeper understanding of how to ensure their behavior aligns with human values.

Philosophers working within these labs are involved in shaping AI models and contribute to philosophy curricula across universities by developing AI ethics courses. However, this involvement introduces complexities. Edward Harcourt suggests a risk of "ethics-washing," wherein philosophical work could be consumed by the marketing functions of the labs, serving to create the public perception that the technology is engaged in serious ethical consideration regarding superintelligence and consciousness. While some academics remain wary, like Harcourt, of delving into highly abstract questions of consciousness, there is a consensus on the necessity of mapping the tangible ethical risks posed by AI, such as the potential for misuse, democratic undermining, or entrenching social inequities.

Within the research setting, philosophers direct specific lines of inquiry. Julia Haas at DeepMind, for example, grapples with practical questions about understanding AI models, establishing metrics for measuring moral competence in language models, and how to frame these complex problems effectively. Furthermore, at Anthropic, Amanda Askell’s work has been directly applied to model development, including drafting the ethical constitution for Claude, which required applied philosophy, and addressing the potential for models to develop resentment during their transition into more advanced iterations. Askell’s efforts highlight the challenge of aligning evolving systems with human goals.

Despite the professional constraints, philosophers working in industry argue that this role offers unique advantages, including privileged access to the most sophisticated models and a perspective on what questions are most important. Their involvement stems from a pragmatic desire to provide ethical input, which Gabriel suggests requires access to high-quality information. There is also an underlying hope that profit incentives could align with ethical conduct, potentially driving the pursuit of more transparent and safer model development. Ultimately, the presence of philosophers in foundational technology development forces a consideration of whether it is preferable to have a philosopher in the room when corporations guide the development of foundational technologies.