Anthropic and DeepMind Are Loading Up on Philosophers, NYT Says

Philosophy majors are having a better time on the job market than computer science majors right now, which is not a sentence that made much sense a decade ago. That is the number a New York Times feature published July 5 leans on, citing Federal Reserve Bank of New York data that put the 2024 unemployment rate for philosophy graduates at 5.1 percent, against 7 percent for computer science. The Times' framing is that "one of humanity's oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other."

The more concrete part of the story is who is doing the hiring. The reporting, as Daily Nous summarized, concentrates on Anthropic and Google DeepMind, which each employ at least a half-dozen philosophers on staff. Named in the piece are Amanda Askell, Robert Long, Geoff Keeling, Iason Gabriel and Patrick Butlin. Askell is Anthropic's resident philosopher, with a Ph.D. from NYU. Gabriel is an in-house philosopher and research scientist at DeepMind who previously taught moral and political philosophy at Oxford.

The reason a lab pays a philosopher rather than another engineer is that a large part of what frontier teams argue over now is not code. What does "honest" mean for a model that can bluff. What does a model "believe." Whether a system that reports something like distress deserves any moral weight. How you write policy for behaviors no product manager has had to define before. Those are questions epistemologists, philosophers of mind and ethicists have worked on for a long time, and the labs appear to have decided it is cheaper to hire people who already have the vocabulary than to reinvent it in-house.

Take the framing with the usual caveats. The Times itself notes that "a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever," and a single-year gap between two majors is a snapshot, not a trend. What the reporting does not give you is a headcount, a hiring pipeline or salary bands, so the story is really about a small number of prestige roles at two labs, not a broad labor market reversal.

Still, if you are a student picking a major or a research leader deciding whom to seat next to the training team, the direction of travel is the part worth watching. People who can argue rigorously about consciousness, agency and truth are, for the first time in a while, in rooms where those arguments have production consequences.