(Originally published on March 17th, 2026.) To what extent has the development of AI over the past several years led to non-academic work for academically-trained philosophers? AI raises questions across various domains of philosophical expertise, including philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of language, epistemology, decision theory, political philosophy, philosophy of computing, etc. What roles are philosophers playing in the firms creating AI technologies, in the consultancies advising them, in non-profit organizations trying to keep an eye on them, in government regulation of them? Amanda Askell of Anthropic may be the most visible philosopher in a non-academic AI role at the moment, but she is not the only one. Also at Anthropic are Joe Carlsmith, Ben Levinstein, and Jackson Kernion. Google DeepMind has Iason Gabriel, Adam Bales, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Arianna Manzini, Julia Haas, and probably others. The Center for AI Safety had some philosophers working for it, but it’s not clear that’s still the case. One of those philosophers, Robert Long, is now the executive director of Eleos AI, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to understanding and addressing the potential wellbeing and moral patienthood of AI systems.” The Future of Life Foundation sponsors fellowships on AI issues and at least one person whose held one of them, Paul de Font-Reaulx, is a graduate student in philosophy. Beba Cibralic is a philosophy PhD who works on AI governance and safety at the RAND Corporation. This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list. If you are aware of other firms and organizations that have hired philosophers to work on AI issues, or about the philosophers they’ve hired, let us know. (Thanks to Seth Lazar (ANU) for help gathering information for this post.) UPDATE (7/6/26): Harvey Lederman is joining Anthropic AI “to work on alignment and character,” he announced recently on social media. He has been on leave from the University of Texas and has been teaching at NYU, and says he will continue to do so.

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