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Anthropic, the company behind popular AI writing assistant Claude, now requires job applicants to agree to not use AI to help with their applications. The company makes this request in most of its 150 current job listings, but not all, and there’s a good reason why.
As Anthropic recommends on its website, “Talk to Claude, anywhere you go. Brainstorm ideas, get answers, and analyze images on the go. The Claude apps put the power of frontier intelligence in your back pocket.”
Just don’t use Claude or any other AI assistant when filling out a job application to work there, especially, according to 404 Media, if you want to work in software engineering, finance, communications, or sales.
“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 job applications request. “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.”
Simon Willison, an open source developer, was the first to notice Anthropic’s request for job applicants to not utilize the very product that they created, used to raise nearly $11 billion in funding, and are trying to get the rest of the world to use in their businesses.
So, why wouldn’t someone want to use Anthropic’s AI assistant, one that excels in conversational writing, to help in filling out a job application. After all, as Anthropic states, “Claude empowers you to deploy AI to business critical use cases, with very low hallucination rates and very high accuracy over long documents.”
As Gizmodo points out, companies like Salesforce and Klarna have already proudly replaced customer service functions with AI chatbots, most likely because it’s cheaper than paying humans to perform those tasks.
So, if AI is good enough for companies to use in something as important as relationships with their customers, why does Anthropic even need humans to apply for their jobs in the first place? Claude 3 Opus, according to the company, “can navigate open-ended prompts and sight-unseen scenarios with remarkable fluency and human-like understanding.” Sounds like they already have a fantastic in-house candidate for most of their jobs. Then again, Claude would be using AI on its application, so it would be disqualified.