Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they won’t use an AI assistant to help write their application.
“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.”
Anthropic released Claude, an AI assistant that’s especially good at conversational writing, in 2023.
This question is in almost all of Anthropic’s nearly 150 currently-listed roles, but is not in some technical roles, like mobile product designer. It’s included in everything from software engineer roles to finance, communications, and sales jobs at the company.
The field was spotted by Simon Willison, an open source developer. The question shows Anthropic trying to get around a problem it’s helping create: people relying so heavily on AI assistants that they struggle to form opinions of their own. It’s also a moot question, as Anthropic and its competitors have created AI models so indistinguishable from human speech as to be nearly undetectable.
These AI models are also replacing the kinds of roles Anthropic is hiring for, leaving people in communications and coding fields searching for employment.
Last month, after Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a model so good it threw U.S. AI companies into a tailspin, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the race to make more, better, and faster AI models is “existentially important.”
And last year, Anthropic’s data scraper, which it uses to feed its AI assistant models the kind of human-produced work the company requires applicants to demonstrate, systematically ignored instructions to not scrape websites and hit some sites millions of times a day.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
