I Think, Therefore I Am Getting Paid by an AI Company
Philosophers are increasingly being recruited by tech companies to help shape artificial intelligence. This trend has emerged as the AI boom accelerates, with firms seeking philosophical insights to navigate ethical dilemmas. The collaboration between philosophy and AI is seen as essential for developing more responsible and virtuous technologies.
- ▪Philosophers with Ph.D.s are being hired by major tech companies to influence AI development.
- ▪In 2013, only 1 percent of philosophy job roles were related to AI, but that figure rose to 16 percent last year.
- ▪AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are consulting philosophers to inform their technology's ethical frameworks.
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| Original publisher | The Atlantic |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-companies-hiring-philosophers/687417/?utm_source=feed |
| Publication time | 2026-06-03T14:31:00-04:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T18:42:53.255Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T18:42:53.255Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 0df4XaezoGkF |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
TechnologyI Think, Therefore I Am Getting Paid by an AI CompanySilicon Valley is turning to philosophers to help build better bots.By Lila ShroffIllustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.June 3, 2026, 2:31 PM ET ShareSave Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what the means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed “an impressively impractical thing to do,” as he later wrote.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Atlantic.
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