A little less than a decade ago, studying philosophy implied a question: “And what are you going to live on?” Like many other races in the Humanities branchthe philosophy registered a low job insertion rate. According to published data in 2023 by EuropaPress, The unemployment rate for Philosophy graduates was 20 times higher than that of Electronic Engineering graduates.
However, in the midst of the rise of AI, the companies that are training and evolving it have realized something: they do not need engineers to program, what they need is to hire philosophers who define how a model should think and how an AI that talks to millions of people every day should behave. Demand has reached a level where their salaries rival those of any senior engineer.
From Socrates to defining AI. Studying philosophy was a risky bet due to its few professional opportunities (mainly teaching) and precarious salaries. But something has changed in the sector that was least expected: that of cutting-edge technology that was developing the AGI.
According to collected In an article published in AtlanticIn 2013, only 1% of the offers published on PhilJobs, the academic job portal, mentioned artificial intelligence in the description of their offers. In 2025, that figure It was already close to 16%. And a good part of those positions were junior positions. That is, they join technology companies even with profiles with little experience.
Why an AI company needs a philosopher. The reason for this change is that companies have made AI capable of processing data emulating the operation of a human neural network, but its interactions are with humansso their responses and decisions must be in tune with the ethical and moral values of humanity. Philosophers have been studying precisely that for centuries.
Anthropic is perhaps the clearest case. Your philosopher Amanda Askell He leads the team that shapes the character of the model, and in January 2026 he published what the company itself calls the Claude constitutiona document of more than twenty thousand words that establishes the values that the system must follow. As the company itself explains, this text is used directly in the training of the model. Askell counted to the magazine time that his way of approaching this work is as if he were dealing with a highly gifted child: “you have to be honest, because a smart child immediately detects when someone is lying to him.”
Google opened the season to sign thinkers. Anthropic is not the only one that has incorporated philosophers into its staff. Google DeepMind took a similar step in April 2026.
As and how I collected the university newspaper Varsitythe company announced the incorporation of Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of mind from the University of Cambridge, for a position that the company itself baptized, literally, as “Philosopher.” His work at DeepMind was to focus on issues of artificial consciousness, human-AI relations, and preparation for AGI.
OpenAI has also taken note. OpenAI has followed a similar path, although less transparent in the details. Sam Altman has come to affirm that ChatGPT’s current responses “are the result of a consultation with ‘hundreds of experts'”, specifying that they were philosophers who have reflected on the ethics of technology and systems.
In fact, even universities have jumped on the bandwagon and the American Philosophical Association (APA) has been delivering since 2024 two annual awards of 10,000 dollars for philosophical investigations on AI.
Profession of the future, but a future that is too fast. Not everything is good news for the union. Daniel Fogal, professor of bioethics at New York University, told The Atlantic that this boom has a real distorting effect on the discipline. According to Fogal, there are philosophers who deep down do not want to dedicate themselves to AI, but feel that they have no choice if they want to enter the job market. The risk, he warns, is that a lot of mediocre work is published just to fit into a passing fad.
Good philosophy takes time, Fogal summarizes, and rarely emerges as a direct response to the market. AI companies, on the other hand, launch new models every few months. The philosopher may be the star signing of the sector, but he will continue to be the person least comfortable with the rush. And perhaps for that very reason it is the one that is most needed in this development.
Image | Unsplash (Sarah Sheedy)
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