Anthropic will let job applicants use AI in interviews, while Claude plays moral watchdog
Anthropic, the AI startup behind the chatbot Claude, has officially walked back one of its most eyebrow-raising hiring policies. Until recently, if you fancied working at one of the world's leading AI companies, you weren't allowed to use AI in your application — particularly when writing the classic 'Why Anthropic?' essay. Yes, really. The company that's been championing AI adoption across industries had drawn the line at its own job candidates using it. But now, Anthropic's had a change of heart.advertisementOn Friday, Mike Krieger, Anthropic chief product officer, confirmed to CNBC that the rule is being scrapped. 'We're having to evolve, even as the company at the forefront of a lot of this technology, around how we evaluate candidates,' he said. 'So our future interview loops will have much more of this ability to co-use AI.'Anthropic is changing its hiring approach"Are you able to use these tools effectively to solve problems?" Krieger said. He compared it to how teachers are rethinking assignments in the age of ChatGPT and Claude. The focus now is on how candidates interact with AI. For instance, what they ask it, what they do with the output, how they tweak it, and how aware they are of the tech's blind spots. This means that you can now bring AI along for the ride, but just be ready to explain how you played with it.advertisement
Krieger made a solid point: if AI is going to be part of the job, especially in software engineering, then it makes sense to see how well candidates can use it, not ban it entirely. Another AI company, Cluely, also abides by the same rule. Know what it thinks, here.Despite the policy shift, job postings on Anthropic's website were still clinging to the old rule as of Friday as reported by the Business Insider report. One listing read: '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's hiring approach contradicts Claude 4 Opus AI moto, ethical AIWhile it seems pleasing to the eyes, it is in contrast to its latest Claude 4 Opus AI system. The model has been highlighted as a snitch. It's built to be super honest, even if it means ratting you out when you've tried something dodgy.Sam Bowman, an AI alignment researcher at Anthropic, recently shared on X (formerly Twitter) that the company's AI model, Claude, is programmed to take serious action if it detects highly unethical behaviour. 'If it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial,' Bowman wrote, 'it will use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above.'advertisementThis kind of vigilant behaviour reflects Anthropic's wider mission to build what it calls 'ethical' AI. According to the company's official system card, the latest version — Claude 4 Opus — has been trained to avoid contributing to any form of harm. It's reportedly grown so capable in internal tests that Anthropic has triggered 'AI Safety Level 3 Protections'. These safeguards are designed to block the model from responding to dangerous queries, such as how to build a biological weapon or engineer a lethal virus.The system has also been hardened to prevent exploitation by malicious actors, including terrorist groups. The whistleblowing feature appears to be a key part of this protective framework. While this type of behaviour isn't entirely new for Anthropic's models, Claude 4 Opus seems to take the initiative more readily than its predecessors, proactively flagging and responding to threats with a new level of assertiveness.
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