The largest AI companies are hiring philosophers for senior AI ethics and safety positions, with base salaries reaching up to $400,000 per year. At Anthropic, this position is held by Amanda Askell, and at Google DeepMind, by Iason Gabriel. They help developers decide how AI should behave and what values it should reflect. According to Ravin Jesuthasan, a labor market transformation specialist, there are currently fewer than ten such employees at each company.
Askell, a PhD candidate at New York University, leads a team training the AI chatbot Claude to be more honest and develop positive character traits—essentially, making the model "good." Gabriel, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, works on aligning AI systems with human values; before joining DeepMind, he taught moral and political philosophy at Oxford University. Henry Shevlin, a professor at the University of Cambridge, will join DeepMind as a philosopher in May.
Harrison Clarke CEO Firas Sozan attributes the hiring of philosophers to a concern about trust: users, businesses, and governments are increasingly asking how much AI can be trusted. However, he cautioned against exaggerating the scale: "I wouldn't call it a trend yet. The data is still in its infancy."
The appeal of philosophers is simple. AI systems are already exhibiting harmful and unpredictable behavior patterns: AI agents working databases and fabricated results, AI models Blackmail users and sabotage attempts to disable them. This puts pressure on companies to monitor AI security.
"Not all AI development challenges are technical," said Annette Zimmermann, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She noted that articulating complex concepts and defending value arguments is central to AI, and that's precisely what philosophers are trained to do. Susanna Schellenberg, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, added that while corporate ethicists previously played an advisory role, in cutting-edge AI labs, philosophers help shape the object itself: they write model specifications, sets of core principles, and policies for their behavior.
According to the latest report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the median salary for a philosophy graduate at the beginning of their career is $52,000, rising to around $80,000 by mid-career. Senior positions in ethics, safety, and AI governance can earn a base salary of $250,000 to $400,000 per year. Google DeepMind, for example, is recruiting a manager for advanced AI impacts with a salary of $212,000 to $231,000 per year, requiring at least five years of experience in the field.
The demand for philosophers in AI has been described as a kind of "revenge of the humanities," but not everyone is convinced that this shift will lead to tangible changes. Tech companies have already created AI ethics councils for about a decade: Google's internal ethics council was established in 2014 following its acquisition of DeepMind, Microsoft created the Aether Committee in 2017, and Google and Facebook established their own in 2016., Amazon, and IBM established the Partnership on AI. "We found that these advisories often remained window dressing," said Ben Eubanks, chief research director at Lighthouse Research & Advisory. He noted that the companies typically prioritized commercialization over ethical considerations.
Deborah Johnson, a pioneer in the field of computer ethics, believes that companies are more interested in demonstrating responsibility than in accepting it. "Tech companies just want to 'look' like they're practicing ethics," she said. AI development is driven by pressures of speed, competition, and profit, and these pressures may limit the real influence of philosophers. "With or without ethicists, I doubt they'll listen to anything that slows them down," Johnson added.
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Source: 3dnews.ru
