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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

477 points by twapi 2y ago

aabhay 2y ago
It’s always the popular clubs that make the most rules
sd9 2y ago
Good luck with that
aprilthird2021 2y ago
That's totally reasonable, imo. You also can't look up the answers using a search engine during your application to work at Google
- scottmf 2y ago
  Why not
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    This probably depends on the questions. When applying for a college math professor job, it's understandable that you'll use mathematica/matlab/whatever for most of actual work, but needing a calculator for simple mutliplication-table style calculations would be a red flag. Especially if there is lecturing involved.
- Xelbair 2y ago
  application or interview? this is about application.
- ahoka 2y ago
  That's actually not reasonable.
muhehe 2y ago
Seems reasonable.
firtoz 2y ago
It's also a personal question, not a "why should someone work here", but a "what motivates YOU"
- itake 2y ago
  You can use an AI assistant to help you fix grammar and come up with creative reasons why you should work there.
  - myfonj 2y ago
    This adds another twist, since I'd bet nowadays most CVs are processed (or at least pre-screened) by "AI": we're in a ridiculous situation where applicants feed a few bullet points to AI to generate full-blown polished resumes and motivational letters … and then HR uses different AI to distil all that back to the original bullet points. Interesting times.
    - jaggederest 2y ago
      This makes me think about adversarial methods of affecting the outcome, where we end up with a "who can hack the metabrain the best" contest. Kind of like the older leet-code system, where obviously software engineering skills were purely secondary to gamesmanship.
- rapidaneurism 2y ago
  As someone for whom the answer is always 'money' I learned very quickly that a certain level of -how should I call it- bullshit is necessary to get the HR person to pass my CV to someone competent. As I am not as skilled in bullshit as I am in coding, it would make sense to outsource that irrelevant part of the selection process, no?
  - slaterbug 2y ago
    Maybe it makes sense for you, however from their perspective, it's not an "irrelevant" part of the selection process, but the most important part.
sigmoid10 2y ago
This is quite a conundrum. These AI companies thrive on the idea that very soon people will not be replaced by AI, but by people who can effectively use AI to be 10x more productive. If AI turns a normal coder into a 10x dev, then why wouldn't you want to see that during an interview? Especially since cheating this whole interview system has become trivial in the past months. It's not the applicants that are the problem, it's the outdated way of doing interviews.
- dailykoder 2y ago
  Very very true! Give them a take home assignment first and if they have a good result on that, give them an easier task, without AI, in person. Then you will quickly figure out who actually understands their work
- sifex 2y ago
  Because as someone who’s interviewing, I know you can use AI — anyone can. It likely obscures me from judging the pitfalls, and design and architecture decisions that are required in proper engineering roles. Especially for senior and above applications, I want to make an assessment of how you think about problems, where it gives a chance for the candidate to show their experience, their technical understanding, and their communication skills. We don’t want to work with AI, we are going to pay the person for the persons time, and we want to employ someone who isn’t switching off half their cognition when a hard problem approaches.
  - nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
    Then they shouldn't use libraries, open source code or even existing compilers. They shouldn't search online (man pages is OK). They should use git plumbing commands and sh (not bash of zsh). They should not have potable water in there house but distill river water.
    - porridgeraisin 2y ago
      There is a balance to be struck. You obviously don't expect a SWE to begin by identifying rare earth metal mining spots on his first day. Where the line is drawn is context dependent, drawing the same single line for all possible situations is not possible and it's stupid to do so.
aw4y 2y ago
this remember me an old interview, years ago, when they asked me to code something "without using Google"....
rapidaneurism 2y ago
Do they also promise not to use ai to evaluate the answers?
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Also will they be happy to provide 200-400 word reasoning how answer to their question was evaluated for each and every candidate? Written by a human.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  I would 100% expect a company to not use AI to evaluate candidates and, if they are, I wouldn't want to work there. That's far worse than using AI as the candidate.
OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Exact opposite of our application process at my previous company. We said usage of ChatGPT was expected during the application and interview phase, since we heavily rely on it for work
- oytis 2y ago
  Wow. I heavily rely on Google for work, wouldn't expect a candidate spend precious interview time googling though.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    There are a bunch of subtly different ways to perform a coding interview. If the interviewer points you at a whiteboard and asks you how to reverse an array, most likely they're checking you know what a for loop is and how to index into an array, and how to be careful of off-by-one errors. Even if your language has a built-in library function for doing this, they'd probably like you to not use it. If the interviewer hands you a laptop with a realistic codebase on it and asks you to implement e-mail address validation, they're going for a more real-world test. Probably they'll be fine with you googling for an e-mail address validation regex, what they want to see is that you do things like add unit tests and whatnot.
    - oytis 2y ago
      Makes sense. I've never been asked to make such an exercise in real time, most of the time that would be a take home task - but I understand if someone wants to do that. Still it would be weird to demand that a candidate uses Google, wouldn't it?
      - michaelt 2y ago
        I picked e-mail validation as an example precisely because it's something even experienced developers would be well advised to google if they want to get it right :) Of course, if someone can get it right off the top of their head, more power to them!
nialse 2y ago
It makes sense. Having the right people with the right merits and motivations will become even more important in the age of AI. Why you might ask? Execution is nothing when AI matures. Grasping the big picture, communicating effectively and possessing domain knowledge will be key. More roles in cognitive work will become senior positions. Of course you must know how to make the most out of AI, but it is more interesting what skills you bring to the table without it.
- nhinck2 2y ago
  > Grasping the big picture, communicating effectively and possessing domain knowledge will be key But isn't this all the things AI promises to solve for you?
  - miningape 2y ago
    It's almost like what people have been saying for years: there's the promise of AI and the reality of AI - and they're 2 very different things. They only look similar to a layman without experience in the field.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >communicating effectively AI may not yet be as good an engineer as most coders, but it's already absolutely much better at written communication than the average sotware engineer (or at least more willing to put effort into it).
sshine 2y ago
> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great replies without AI use and great replies with AI use, and you won't be able to tell whether a great reply used AI or not. You will just be able to filter sludge and dyslexia. 2) This is still the "AI is cheating" approach, and I had hoped Anthropic to be thought leaders on responsible AI use: In life there is no cheating. You're just optimizing for the wrong thing. AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. If AI is making your final product and you're none the wiser, it didn't really help you, it just made you addicted to it. Teach a man to fish...
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- jon-wood 2y ago
  > AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. At least in theory that’s not what homework is. Homework should be exercises to allow practicing whatever technique you’re trying to learn, because most people learn best by repeatedly doing a thing rather than reading a few chapters of a book. By applying an LLM to the problem you’re just practicing how to use an LLM, which may be useful in its own right, but will turn you into a one trick pony who’s left unable to do anything they can’t use an LLM for.
  - shipp02 2y ago
    What if you use it to get unstuck from a problem? Then come back and learn more about what you got stuck on. That seems like responsible use.
    - croes 2y ago
      But how likely is that?
Ekaros 2y ago
Why aren't they dog fooding? Surely if AIs improve output and performance they should readily accept input from them. Seems like they don't believe in their own products.
avereveard 2y ago
Evaluators neither but here we are
fancyfredbot 2y ago
If I want to assess a candidates performance when they can't use AI then I think I'd sit in a room with them and talk to them. If I ask people not to use AI on a task where using AI is advantageous and undetectable then I'm going to discriminate against honest people.
- yreg 2y ago
  Is it advantageous? The AI generated responses to this question are prone to be dull. It might even give the honest people an advantage by giving them a tip to answer on their own.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  I think this gets to the core of the issue: interviews should be conducted by people who deeply understand the role and should involve a discussion, not a quiz.
- mrdevlar 2y ago
  But they don't want to do that. They want to use AI in their hiring process. They want to be able to offload their work and biases to the machine. They just don't want other people to do it. There's a reason that the EU AI legislation made AI that is used to hire people one of the focal points for action.
nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
Not new they had that 5 years ago at least. Anthropic interview is nebulous. You get a coding interview. Fast paced, little time, 100% pass mark. Then they chat to you for half an hour to gauge your ethics. Maybe I was too honest :) I'm really bad at the "essay" subjects vsm the "hard" subjects so at that point I was dumped.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  You can definitely pass their interview without solving everything.
- davely 2y ago
  I recently took their CodeSignal assessment, which is part of their initial screening process. Oh, wow. I really believe they are missing out on great engineers due to the nature of it. 90 minutes to implement a series of increasingly difficult specs and pass all the unit tests. There is zero consideration for quality of code. My email from the recruiter said (verbatim), “the CodeSignal screen is intended to test your ability to quickly and correctly write and refactor working code. You will not be evaluated on code quality.” It was my first time ever taking a CodeSignal assessment and there was really no way to prepare for it ahead of time. Apparently, I can apply again in 6 months.
  - JacksCracked 2y ago
    [dead]
sussmannbaka 2y ago
slop for thee but not for me
- omeysalvi 2y ago
  don't get high off your own supply
foul 2y ago
Don't get high on your own supply, like zuck doing the conquistador in Kaua'i
rixed 2y ago
I understand why it's amusing, but there is really nothing to see here. It could be rephrased as: « The process we use to asses candidates relies on measuring the candidate's ability to solve trivia problems that can easily be solved by AI (or internet search or impersonation etc). Please refrain from using such tools until the industry come up with a better way to assess candidates. » Actually, since the whole point of those many screening levels during hiring is to avoid the cost of having long, in depth discussions between many experts and each individual candidates, probably IA will be the solution that makes the selection process a bit less reliant on trivia quizz (a solution that will, no doubt, come with its own set of new issues).
noncoml 2y ago
If Alice can do better against Bob when they aren’t using AI, but Bob performs better when both use AI, isn’t it in the company’s best interest to hire Bob, since AI is there to be used during his position duties? If graphic design A can design on paper better that B, but B can design on the computer better than A, paper or computer, why would you hire A?
alex1138 2y ago
I generally trust Anthropic vs others, I think Claude (beyond obligatory censorship) ticks all the right boxes and strikes the right balance
1GZ0 2y ago
You wouldn't show up drunk to a job interview just because its at brewery, would you?
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Never get high on your own supply ;)
- jaggederest 2y ago
  I guarantee you the lawns at the lawnmower manufacturer are not cut with scissors. Isn't Anthropic's stated goal to make "nice" self-improving general AI? Cut out the middleman and have the AI train the next generation.
- psb217 2y ago
  If getting drunk significantly increased my ability to appear competent then, yes, I would...
- Sateeshm 2y ago
  If the brewery is selling and promoting drinking at work, then yes.
ReptileMan 2y ago
Much better approach is to ask the candidate about the limitations of AI assistants and the rakes you can step on while walking that path. And the rakes you have already stepped on with AI.
neilv 2y ago
Kudos to Anthropic. The industry has way too many workers rationalizing cheating with AI right now. Also, I think that the people who are saying it doesn't matter if they use AI to write their job application might not realize that: 1. Sometimes, application questions actually do have a point. 2. Some people can read a lot into what you say, and how you say it.
CaptainFever 2y ago
> While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Full quote here; seems like most of the comments here are leaving out the first part.
ben30 2y ago
This application requirement really bothered me as someone who's autistic and dyslexic. I think visually, and while I have valid ideas and unique perspectives, I sometimes struggle to convert my visual thoughts into traditional spoken/written language. AI tools are invaluable to me - they help bridge the gap between my visual thinking and the written expression that's expected in professional settings. LLMs are essentially translation tools. I use them to translate my picture-thinking into words, just like others might use spell-checkers or dictation software. They don't change my ideas or insights - they just help me express them in a neurotypical-friendly format. The irony here is that Anthropic is developing AI systems supposedly to benefit humanity, yet their application process explicitly excludes people who use AI as an accessibility tool. It's like telling someone they can't use their usual assistive tools during an application process. When they say they want to evaluate "non-AI-assisted communication skills," they're essentially saying they want to evaluate my ability to communicate without my accessibility tools. For me, AI-assisted communication is actually a more authentic representation of my thoughts. It's not about gaining an unfair advantage - it's about leveling the playing field so my ideas can be understood by others. This seems particularly short-sighted for a company developing AI systems. Shouldn't they want diverse perspectives, including from neurodivergent individuals who might have unique insights into how AI can genuinely help people think and communicate differently?
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- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  This is an excellent comment and it more-or-less changes my opinion on this issue. I approached it with an "AI bad" mentality which, if truth be told, I'm still going to hold. But you make a very good argument for why AI should be allowed and carefully monitored. I think it was the spell-checker analogy that really sold me. And this ties in with the whole point that "AI" isn't one thing, it's a huge spectrum. I really don't think there's anything wrong with an interviewee using an editor that highlights their syntax, for example. Where do you draw the line, though? Maybe you just don't. You conduct the interview and, if practical coding is a part of it, you observe the candidate using AI (or not) and assess them accordingly. If they just behave like a dumb proxy, they don't get the job. Beyond that, judge how dependant they are on AI and how well they can use it as a tool. Not easy, but probably better than just outright banning AI.
hhthrowaway1230 2y ago
This has a poetic tone to it. However, not sure what to think of it. So AI should help people on their job and their interview process, but also not? When it matters? What if you're super good ML/AI, but very bad at doing applications? Would you still have a chance? Or do you get filtered out?
matsemann 2y ago
Relevant (and could probably have been a comment there): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909166 "Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?"
surfingdino 2y ago
This insistence of using only human intelligence reminds me of the quest for low-background steel.
TypingOutBugs 2y ago
How do you guys do coding assessments nowadays with AI? I don’t mind if applicants use it in our tech round but if they do I question them on the generated code and potential performance or design issues (if I spot any) - but not sure if it’s the best approach (I mostly hire SDETs so do a ‘easy’ dev round with a few easy/very easy leet code questions that don’t require prep)
rcarmo 2y ago
Anthropic is kind of positioning themselves as the "we want the cream of the crop" company (Dario himself said as much in his Davos interviews), and what I could understand was that they would a) prefer to pick people they already knew b) didn't really care about recruiting outside the US. Maybe I read that wrong, but I suspect they are self-selecting themselves out of some pretty large talent pools, AI or not. But that application note is completely consistent with what they espouse as their core values.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
Question 1: Write a program that describes the number of SS's in "Slow Mississippi bass". Then multiply the result by hex number A & 2. Question 2: Do you think your peers will haze you week 1 of the evaluation period? [Yes|No] There are a million reasons to exclude people, and most HR people will filter anything odd or extraordinary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio&t=1765s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio&t=1765s Hardly a new issue, =3
radu_floricica 2y ago
I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use AI and not be caught? Is it cheating? Does it matter if it's cheating?" I think that's a bit like lying on your first date. If you're looking to score, sure, it's somewhat unethical but it works. But if you're looking for a long term collaboration, _and_ you expect to be interviewed by several rounds of very smart people, then you're much better off just going along.
- xnorswap 2y ago
  I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the zeitgeist, because I can't imagine not going along with what's a polite request not to use AI. I guess that puts me at a serious disadvantage in the job market, but I am okay with that, I've always been okay with that. 20 years ago my cohort were doing what I thought were selfish things to get ahead, and I'm fine with not doing those things and ending up on a different lesser trajectory. But that doesn't mean I won't also air my dissatisfaction with just how much people seem to justify selfishness, or don't even regard it as selfish to ignore this request. [1] https://fortune.com/2024/03/12/age-of-selfishness-sick-single-miserable-brains-hardwired-self-interest-altruism-mental-health/ https://fortune.com/2024/03/12/age-of-selfishness-sick-singl...
  - exe34 2y ago
    > "Well it's not illegal" What's good for the gander.... I promise you they will use AI to vet your application.
    - 2y ago
jusomg 2y ago
I do lots of technical interviews in Big Tech, and I would be open to candidates using AI tools in the open. I don't know why most companies ban it. IMO we should embrace them, or at least try to and see how it goes (maybe as a pilot program?). I believe it won't change the outcomes that much. For example, on coding, an AI can't teach someone to program or reason in the spot, and the purpose of the interview never was to just answer the coding puzzle anyway. To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc). If I give you a puzzle and you paste the most optimized answer with no reasoning or comment you're not going to pass the interview, no matter if it's done with AI, from memory or with stack overflow. So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.
- jusomg 2y ago
  You could also learn a lot from what someone is asking an AI assistant. Someone asking: "solve this problem" vs "what is the difference between array and dict" vs "what is the time complexity of a hashmap add operation", etc. They give you different nuances on what the candidate knows and how it is approaching the understanding of the problem and its solution.
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  It's a new spin on the old leetcode problem - if you are good at leetcode you are not necessarily a good programmer for a company.
- gjulianm 2y ago
  > So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic. Candidates could also have an AI listening to the questions and giving them answers. There are other ways that they could be in the process without copy/pasting blindly. > To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc). Exactly, that's why I feel like saying "AI is not allowed" makes it all more clear. As interviewers we want to see these abilities you have, and if candidates use an AI it's harder to know what's them and what's the AI. It's not that we don't think AI is an useful tool, it's that it reduces the amount of signal we get in an interview; and in any case there's the assumption than the better someone performs the better they could use AI.
andy_ppp 2y ago
If your test can be done by an LLM maybe you shouldn't be hiring a human being based on that test...
npteljes 2y ago
Funny on the tin, but it makes complete sense to me. A sunglasses company would also ask me to take off my sunglasses during the job interview, presumably.
- optimalsolver 2y ago
  Thanks for the amusing mental image.
Daub 2y ago
Half way through a recent interview it became very apparent that the candidate was using AI. This was only apparent in the standard 'why are you interested in working here?' Questions. Once the questions became more AI resistant the candidate floundered. There English language skills and there general reasoning declined catastrophically. These question had originally been introduced to see see how good the candidate was at thinking abstractly. Example: 'what is your creative philosophy?'
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- csomar 2y ago
  > what is your creative philosophy? Seriously?
  - Daub 2y ago
    Yep. Some candidates really enjoy the question to the point where it becomes difficult to get them to stop answering it.
    - MattSayar 2y ago
      Have you noticed a correlation in candidate quality vs the time spent answering that question?
      - Daub 2y ago
        > Have you noticed a correlation in candidate quality vs the time spent answering that question? Yes, certainly. Over the years our skill at interviewing has grown. We try to craft a balance between asking questions which require exact responses, and those which the candidate is free to improvise upon.
- gameshot911 2y ago
  >There English language skills... declined catastrophically. Let he who is without sin...
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>Why do you want to work at Anthropic? (We value this response highly - great answers are often 200-400 words.) Low lifes
skc 2y ago
AI for thee but not for me?
Applejinx 2y ago
Maybe they are ahead of the curve at finding that hiring people based on ability to exploit AI-augmented reach produces catastrophically bad results. If so, that's bad for their mission and marketing department, but it just puts them in the realm of a tobacco company, which can still be quite profitable so long as they don't offer health care insurance and free cigarettes to their employees :) I see no conflict of interest in their reasoning. They're just trying to screen out people who trust their product, presumably because they've had more experience than most with such people. Who would be more likely to attract AI-augmented job applicants and trust their apparent augmented skill than an AI company? They would have far more experience with this than most, because they'd be ground zero for NOT rejecting the idea.
leCaptain 2y ago
this is a reasonable request, provided there is a human on the other side who is going to read the 200-400 word response, and make a judgment call.
hinkley 2y ago
Prepping for an interview a couple weeks ago, I grabbed the latest version of IntelliJ. I wanted to set up a blank project with some tests, in case I got stuck and wanted to bail out of whatever app they hit me with and just have unit tests available. So lacking any other ideas for a sample project I just started implementing Fizzbuzz. And IntelliJ started auto suggesting the implementation. That seems more problematic than helpful, so it was a good thing I didn’t end up needing it.
Shamalamading 2y ago
On the face of it it's a reasonable request but the question itself is pointless. An applicants outside opinion on a company is pretty irrelevant and is subject to a lot of change after starting work.
ionwake 2y ago
TBH its motivated me to apply with AI to try somehow to get away with it. (I need to reevaluate my work load and priorities.)
commandersaki 2y ago
I'd be fine with this if they agree to not use AI to assess you as a candidate.
yapyap 2y ago
It’s cause they wanna use the data to train AI on and traininy AI on AI is useless.
jonsolo 2y ago
The goal of an interview is to assess talent. AI use gets in the way of that. If the goal were only to produce working code, or to write a quality essay, then sure use AI. But arguing that misunderstands the point of the interview process. Disclaimer: I work at Anthropic but these views are my own.
ulfw 2y ago
Beyond ridiculous. I am lacking words on how stupid this statement is coming from the AI company who enables all this crap.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
Funny this massive irony just out, as I don’t think I’ll renew my subscription with them because of R1.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
Aha: maybe they want to train their AI on their applicant’s / job seekers text submissions :D
yosito 2y ago
How much you wanna bet they're using AI to evaluate applicants and they don't even have a human reading 99% of the applications they're asking people to write? As someone who has recently applied to over 300 jobs, just to get form letter rejections, it's really hard to want to invest my time to hand-write an application that I know isn't even going to be read by a human.
thih9 2y ago
> We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system Is the application being reviewed with the help of an AI assistant though? If yes, AI mediation is still taking place.
autonomousErwin 2y ago
This probably means they are completely unable to differentiate between AI and non-AI else they would just discard the AI piles of applications.
gcanyon 2y ago
Everyone arguing for LLMs as a corrupting crutch needs to explain why this time is different: why the grammar-checkers-are-crutches, don't-use-wikipedia, spell-check-is-a-crutch, etc. etc. people were all wrong, but this time the tool really is somehow unacceptable.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  You forgot calculators ;)
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    Definitely agreed. And slide rules, and log tables, and...
- mrweasel 2y ago
  It also depends on what you're hiring for. If you want a proofreader you probably want to test their abilities to both use a grammar checker, and work without it. For me the difference is that using an LLM requires a insane amount of work from the interviewer. Fair enough that you'd use Copilot day to day, but can you actually prompt it? Are you able to judge the quality of the output (or where you planning on just pawning that of to your code-reviewer). The spell checker is a good example, do you trust it blindly, or are you literate enough to spot when it makes mistakes? The "being able to spot the mistakes" is what an interviewer wants to know. Can you actually reason about a problem and sadly many cannot.
_heimdall 2y ago
The irony here is obvious, but what's interesting is that Anthropic is basically asking to not give then a realistic preview of how you will work. This feels similar to asking devs to only use vim during a coding challenge and please refrain from using VS Code or another full featured IDE. If you know, and even encourage, your employees to use LLMs at work you should want to see how well candidates present themselves in that same situation.
- donohoe 2y ago
  It’s hardly that. This is one component of an interview process - not all of it!
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    I'm out of context here as I'm not applying to Anthropic, not surprised at all if I'm missing details of the full process! If this is just for a written part of the process or something, maybe I get it? But even then, if you expect employees to us LLMs I'd really want to see how well they interview with the LLMs available.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      There are parts of the interview that allow LLMs.
- hmottestad 2y ago
  I still don't know how to quit Vim without googling for instructions :P As an anecdote from my time at uni, I can share that all our exams were either writing code with pen on paper for 3-4 hours, or a take-home exam that would make up 50% of the final grade. There was never any expectation that students would use pen and paper on their take-home exams. You were free to use your books and to search the web for help, but you were not allowed to copy any code you found without citing it. Also not allowed to collaborate with anyone.
OutOfHere 2y ago
Whenever someone asks you to not do something that is victimless, you always should think about the power they are taking away from you, often unfairly. It is often the reason why they have power over you at all. By then doing that very thing, you regain your power, and so you absolutely should do it. I am not asking you to become a criminal, but to never be subservient to a corporation.
rock_artist 2y ago
So suddenly we're in a state where: - AI companies ask candidates to not "eat their own dog food" - AI companies blames each other of "copying" their IP while they find it legit to use "humans" IP for training.
mohsen1 2y ago
Pretty ironic that they use an automated system called CodeSignal that does the first round of the interviews
luke-stanley 2y ago
I'm sure Anthropic have too many applications submitted that are obviously AI generated, and I am sure what they mean by "non-AI-assisted communication", they don't want "slop" applications, that sounds like a LLM wrote it. They want some greater proof of human ability. I expect humans at Anthropic can tell what LLM model was used to rewrite (or polish) applications they get, but if they can't, a basic BERT classifier can (I've trained one for this task, it's not so hard).
farceSpherule 2y ago
So I guess people should not use other available tools? Spell checker? Grammar checker? The Internet? Grammarly? The issue is that they are receiving excellent responses from everyone and can no longer discriminate against people who are not good at writing.
trollbridge 2y ago
This strikes me as similar to job applicants who apply for a position and are told it's hybrid or in-office - and then on the day of the interview, it suddenly changes from one in-person to one held over a videoconference, with the other participants with backdrops that look suspiciously like they're working from home.
dhfbshfbu4u3 2y ago
Cool. Does that mean Anthropic is not using ATS to scan resumes? Of course it doesn’t…
layer8 2y ago
Plot twist: They are actually looking for the freethinkers who are subversive enough to still use AI assistants.
snakeyjake 2y ago
At least someone realizes the soulless unimaginative mediocrity machine makes people sound soulless, unimaginative, and mediocre.
wosined 2y ago
Only if they stop screening us with their shitty AI first.
wosined 2y ago
Only if they stop screening us with their shitty AI first. Otherwise it is slop vs slop.
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nunez 2y ago
This feels very similar to ophthalmologists who make their money pushing LASIK while refusing to get it done on themselves or their relatives. "This procedure is life-changing! But..." Anyway, bring back in-person interviews! That's the only way to work around this Pandora's Box they themselves opened.
ccourtenay 2y ago
You want to work at an AI company that does not allow the use of AI by it's future employees. That is likely enough said right there. Keep looking for a company that has it's head screwed on straight.
hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
That's hilarious. A comedy script couldn't beat real life in 2025.
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chuckro84 2y ago
The HR are probably using AI to waste our time with their ridiculously worded job descriptions and now you can have a computer respond... You have simply completed the circle of stupidity. If they are upset you have sidestepped putting yourself inside their circle, maybe there is a better place to work after all...

477 points by twapi 2y ago

aabhay 2y ago

It’s always the popular clubs that make the most rules

sd9 2y ago

Good luck with that

aprilthird2021 2y ago

That's totally reasonable, imo. You also can't look up the answers using a search engine during your application to work at Google

scottmf 2y ago
Why not
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  This probably depends on the questions. When applying for a college math professor job, it's understandable that you'll use mathematica/matlab/whatever for most of actual work, but needing a calculator for simple mutliplication-table style calculations would be a red flag. Especially if there is lecturing involved.
Xelbair 2y ago
application or interview? this is about application.
ahoka 2y ago
That's actually not reasonable.

muhehe 2y ago

Seems reasonable.

firtoz 2y ago

It's also a personal question, not a "why should someone work here", but a "what motivates YOU"

itake 2y ago
You can use an AI assistant to help you fix grammar and come up with creative reasons why you should work there.
- myfonj 2y ago
  This adds another twist, since I'd bet nowadays most CVs are processed (or at least pre-screened) by "AI": we're in a ridiculous situation where applicants feed a few bullet points to AI to generate full-blown polished resumes and motivational letters … and then HR uses different AI to distil all that back to the original bullet points. Interesting times.
  - jaggederest 2y ago
    This makes me think about adversarial methods of affecting the outcome, where we end up with a "who can hack the metabrain the best" contest. Kind of like the older leet-code system, where obviously software engineering skills were purely secondary to gamesmanship.
rapidaneurism 2y ago
As someone for whom the answer is always 'money' I learned very quickly that a certain level of -how should I call it- bullshit is necessary to get the HR person to pass my CV to someone competent. As I am not as skilled in bullshit as I am in coding, it would make sense to outsource that irrelevant part of the selection process, no?
- slaterbug 2y ago
  Maybe it makes sense for you, however from their perspective, it's not an "irrelevant" part of the selection process, but the most important part.

sigmoid10 2y ago

This is quite a conundrum. These AI companies thrive on the idea that very soon people will not be replaced by AI, but by people who can effectively use AI to be 10x more productive. If AI turns a normal coder into a 10x dev, then why wouldn't you want to see that during an interview? Especially since cheating this whole interview system has become trivial in the past months. It's not the applicants that are the problem, it's the outdated way of doing interviews.

dailykoder 2y ago
Very very true! Give them a take home assignment first and if they have a good result on that, give them an easier task, without AI, in person. Then you will quickly figure out who actually understands their work
sifex 2y ago
Because as someone who’s interviewing, I know you can use AI — anyone can. It likely obscures me from judging the pitfalls, and design and architecture decisions that are required in proper engineering roles. Especially for senior and above applications, I want to make an assessment of how you think about problems, where it gives a chance for the candidate to show their experience, their technical understanding, and their communication skills. We don’t want to work with AI, we are going to pay the person for the persons time, and we want to employ someone who isn’t switching off half their cognition when a hard problem approaches.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
  Then they shouldn't use libraries, open source code or even existing compilers. They shouldn't search online (man pages is OK). They should use git plumbing commands and sh (not bash of zsh). They should not have potable water in there house but distill river water.
  - porridgeraisin 2y ago
    There is a balance to be struck. You obviously don't expect a SWE to begin by identifying rare earth metal mining spots on his first day. Where the line is drawn is context dependent, drawing the same single line for all possible situations is not possible and it's stupid to do so.

aw4y 2y ago

this remember me an old interview, years ago, when they asked me to code something "without using Google"....

rapidaneurism 2y ago

Do they also promise not to use ai to evaluate the answers?

Ekaros 2y ago
Also will they be happy to provide 200-400 word reasoning how answer to their question was evaluated for each and every candidate? Written by a human.
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
I would 100% expect a company to not use AI to evaluate candidates and, if they are, I wouldn't want to work there. That's far worse than using AI as the candidate.

OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Exact opposite of our application process at my previous company. We said usage of ChatGPT was expected during the application and interview phase, since we heavily rely on it for work

oytis 2y ago
Wow. I heavily rely on Google for work, wouldn't expect a candidate spend precious interview time googling though.
- michaelt 2y ago
  There are a bunch of subtly different ways to perform a coding interview. If the interviewer points you at a whiteboard and asks you how to reverse an array, most likely they're checking you know what a for loop is and how to index into an array, and how to be careful of off-by-one errors. Even if your language has a built-in library function for doing this, they'd probably like you to not use it. If the interviewer hands you a laptop with a realistic codebase on it and asks you to implement e-mail address validation, they're going for a more real-world test. Probably they'll be fine with you googling for an e-mail address validation regex, what they want to see is that you do things like add unit tests and whatnot.
  - oytis 2y ago
    Makes sense. I've never been asked to make such an exercise in real time, most of the time that would be a take home task - but I understand if someone wants to do that. Still it would be weird to demand that a candidate uses Google, wouldn't it?
    - michaelt 2y ago
      I picked e-mail validation as an example precisely because it's something even experienced developers would be well advised to google if they want to get it right :) Of course, if someone can get it right off the top of their head, more power to them!

nialse 2y ago

It makes sense. Having the right people with the right merits and motivations will become even more important in the age of AI. Why you might ask? Execution is nothing when AI matures. Grasping the big picture, communicating effectively and possessing domain knowledge will be key. More roles in cognitive work will become senior positions. Of course you must know how to make the most out of AI, but it is more interesting what skills you bring to the table without it.

nhinck2 2y ago
> Grasping the big picture, communicating effectively and possessing domain knowledge will be key But isn't this all the things AI promises to solve for you?
- miningape 2y ago
  It's almost like what people have been saying for years: there's the promise of AI and the reality of AI - and they're 2 very different things. They only look similar to a layman without experience in the field.
logicchains 2y ago
>communicating effectively AI may not yet be as good an engineer as most coders, but it's already absolutely much better at written communication than the average sotware engineer (or at least more willing to put effort into it).

sshine 2y ago

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great replies without AI use and great replies with AI use, and you won't be able to tell whether a great reply used AI or not. You will just be able to filter sludge and dyslexia. 2) This is still the "AI is cheating" approach, and I had hoped Anthropic to be thought leaders on responsible AI use: In life there is no cheating. You're just optimizing for the wrong thing. AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. If AI is making your final product and you're none the wiser, it didn't really help you, it just made you addicted to it. Teach a man to fish...

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jon-wood 2y ago
> AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent. At least in theory that’s not what homework is. Homework should be exercises to allow practicing whatever technique you’re trying to learn, because most people learn best by repeatedly doing a thing rather than reading a few chapters of a book. By applying an LLM to the problem you’re just practicing how to use an LLM, which may be useful in its own right, but will turn you into a one trick pony who’s left unable to do anything they can’t use an LLM for.
- shipp02 2y ago
  What if you use it to get unstuck from a problem? Then come back and learn more about what you got stuck on. That seems like responsible use.
  - croes 2y ago
    But how likely is that?

Ekaros 2y ago

Why aren't they dog fooding? Surely if AIs improve output and performance they should readily accept input from them. Seems like they don't believe in their own products.

avereveard 2y ago

Evaluators neither but here we are

fancyfredbot 2y ago

If I want to assess a candidates performance when they can't use AI then I think I'd sit in a room with them and talk to them. If I ask people not to use AI on a task where using AI is advantageous and undetectable then I'm going to discriminate against honest people.

yreg 2y ago
Is it advantageous? The AI generated responses to this question are prone to be dull. It might even give the honest people an advantage by giving them a tip to answer on their own.
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
I think this gets to the core of the issue: interviews should be conducted by people who deeply understand the role and should involve a discussion, not a quiz.
mrdevlar 2y ago
But they don't want to do that. They want to use AI in their hiring process. They want to be able to offload their work and biases to the machine. They just don't want other people to do it. There's a reason that the EU AI legislation made AI that is used to hire people one of the focal points for action.

nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago

Not new they had that 5 years ago at least. Anthropic interview is nebulous. You get a coding interview. Fast paced, little time, 100% pass mark. Then they chat to you for half an hour to gauge your ethics. Maybe I was too honest :) I'm really bad at the "essay" subjects vsm the "hard" subjects so at that point I was dumped.

saagarjha 2y ago
You can definitely pass their interview without solving everything.
davely 2y ago
I recently took their CodeSignal assessment, which is part of their initial screening process. Oh, wow. I really believe they are missing out on great engineers due to the nature of it. 90 minutes to implement a series of increasingly difficult specs and pass all the unit tests. There is zero consideration for quality of code. My email from the recruiter said (verbatim), “the CodeSignal screen is intended to test your ability to quickly and correctly write and refactor working code. You will not be evaluated on code quality.” It was my first time ever taking a CodeSignal assessment and there was really no way to prepare for it ahead of time. Apparently, I can apply again in 6 months.
- JacksCracked 2y ago
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sussmannbaka 2y ago

slop for thee but not for me

omeysalvi 2y ago
don't get high off your own supply

foul 2y ago

Don't get high on your own supply, like zuck doing the conquistador in Kaua'i

rixed 2y ago

I understand why it's amusing, but there is really nothing to see here. It could be rephrased as: « The process we use to asses candidates relies on measuring the candidate's ability to solve trivia problems that can easily be solved by AI (or internet search or impersonation etc). Please refrain from using such tools until the industry come up with a better way to assess candidates. » Actually, since the whole point of those many screening levels during hiring is to avoid the cost of having long, in depth discussions between many experts and each individual candidates, probably IA will be the solution that makes the selection process a bit less reliant on trivia quizz (a solution that will, no doubt, come with its own set of new issues).

noncoml 2y ago

If Alice can do better against Bob when they aren’t using AI, but Bob performs better when both use AI, isn’t it in the company’s best interest to hire Bob, since AI is there to be used during his position duties? If graphic design A can design on paper better that B, but B can design on the computer better than A, paper or computer, why would you hire A?

alex1138 2y ago

I generally trust Anthropic vs others, I think Claude (beyond obligatory censorship) ticks all the right boxes and strikes the right balance

1GZ0 2y ago

You wouldn't show up drunk to a job interview just because its at brewery, would you?

moffkalast 2y ago
Never get high on your own supply ;)
jaggederest 2y ago
I guarantee you the lawns at the lawnmower manufacturer are not cut with scissors. Isn't Anthropic's stated goal to make "nice" self-improving general AI? Cut out the middleman and have the AI train the next generation.
psb217 2y ago
If getting drunk significantly increased my ability to appear competent then, yes, I would...
Sateeshm 2y ago
If the brewery is selling and promoting drinking at work, then yes.

ReptileMan 2y ago

Much better approach is to ask the candidate about the limitations of AI assistants and the rakes you can step on while walking that path. And the rakes you have already stepped on with AI.

neilv 2y ago

Kudos to Anthropic. The industry has way too many workers rationalizing cheating with AI right now. Also, I think that the people who are saying it doesn't matter if they use AI to write their job application might not realize that: 1. Sometimes, application questions actually do have a point. 2. Some people can read a lot into what you say, and how you say it.

CaptainFever 2y ago

> While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Full quote here; seems like most of the comments here are leaving out the first part.

ben30 2y ago

This application requirement really bothered me as someone who's autistic and dyslexic. I think visually, and while I have valid ideas and unique perspectives, I sometimes struggle to convert my visual thoughts into traditional spoken/written language. AI tools are invaluable to me - they help bridge the gap between my visual thinking and the written expression that's expected in professional settings. LLMs are essentially translation tools. I use them to translate my picture-thinking into words, just like others might use spell-checkers or dictation software. They don't change my ideas or insights - they just help me express them in a neurotypical-friendly format. The irony here is that Anthropic is developing AI systems supposedly to benefit humanity, yet their application process explicitly excludes people who use AI as an accessibility tool. It's like telling someone they can't use their usual assistive tools during an application process. When they say they want to evaluate "non-AI-assisted communication skills," they're essentially saying they want to evaluate my ability to communicate without my accessibility tools. For me, AI-assisted communication is actually a more authentic representation of my thoughts. It's not about gaining an unfair advantage - it's about leveling the playing field so my ideas can be understood by others. This seems particularly short-sighted for a company developing AI systems. Shouldn't they want diverse perspectives, including from neurodivergent individuals who might have unique insights into how AI can genuinely help people think and communicate differently?

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oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
This is an excellent comment and it more-or-less changes my opinion on this issue. I approached it with an "AI bad" mentality which, if truth be told, I'm still going to hold. But you make a very good argument for why AI should be allowed and carefully monitored. I think it was the spell-checker analogy that really sold me. And this ties in with the whole point that "AI" isn't one thing, it's a huge spectrum. I really don't think there's anything wrong with an interviewee using an editor that highlights their syntax, for example. Where do you draw the line, though? Maybe you just don't. You conduct the interview and, if practical coding is a part of it, you observe the candidate using AI (or not) and assess them accordingly. If they just behave like a dumb proxy, they don't get the job. Beyond that, judge how dependant they are on AI and how well they can use it as a tool. Not easy, but probably better than just outright banning AI.

hhthrowaway1230 2y ago

This has a poetic tone to it. However, not sure what to think of it. So AI should help people on their job and their interview process, but also not? When it matters? What if you're super good ML/AI, but very bad at doing applications? Would you still have a chance? Or do you get filtered out?

matsemann 2y ago

Relevant (and could probably have been a comment there): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909166 "Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?"

surfingdino 2y ago

This insistence of using only human intelligence reminds me of the quest for low-background steel.

TypingOutBugs 2y ago

How do you guys do coding assessments nowadays with AI? I don’t mind if applicants use it in our tech round but if they do I question them on the generated code and potential performance or design issues (if I spot any) - but not sure if it’s the best approach (I mostly hire SDETs so do a ‘easy’ dev round with a few easy/very easy leet code questions that don’t require prep)

rcarmo 2y ago

Anthropic is kind of positioning themselves as the "we want the cream of the crop" company (Dario himself said as much in his Davos interviews), and what I could understand was that they would a) prefer to pick people they already knew b) didn't really care about recruiting outside the US. Maybe I read that wrong, but I suspect they are self-selecting themselves out of some pretty large talent pools, AI or not. But that application note is completely consistent with what they espouse as their core values.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

Question 1: Write a program that describes the number of SS's in "Slow Mississippi bass". Then multiply the result by hex number A & 2. Question 2: Do you think your peers will haze you week 1 of the evaluation period? [Yes|No] There are a million reasons to exclude people, and most HR people will filter anything odd or extraordinary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio&t=1765s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio&t=1765s Hardly a new issue, =3

radu_floricica 2y ago

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use AI and not be caught? Is it cheating? Does it matter if it's cheating?" I think that's a bit like lying on your first date. If you're looking to score, sure, it's somewhat unethical but it works. But if you're looking for a long term collaboration, _and_ you expect to be interviewed by several rounds of very smart people, then you're much better off just going along.

xnorswap 2y ago
I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the zeitgeist, because I can't imagine not going along with what's a polite request not to use AI. I guess that puts me at a serious disadvantage in the job market, but I am okay with that, I've always been okay with that. 20 years ago my cohort were doing what I thought were selfish things to get ahead, and I'm fine with not doing those things and ending up on a different lesser trajectory. But that doesn't mean I won't also air my dissatisfaction with just how much people seem to justify selfishness, or don't even regard it as selfish to ignore this request. [1] https://fortune.com/2024/03/12/age-of-selfishness-sick-single-miserable-brains-hardwired-self-interest-altruism-mental-health/ https://fortune.com/2024/03/12/age-of-selfishness-sick-singl...
- exe34 2y ago
  > "Well it's not illegal" What's good for the gander.... I promise you they will use AI to vet your application.
  - 2y ago

jusomg 2y ago

I do lots of technical interviews in Big Tech, and I would be open to candidates using AI tools in the open. I don't know why most companies ban it. IMO we should embrace them, or at least try to and see how it goes (maybe as a pilot program?). I believe it won't change the outcomes that much. For example, on coding, an AI can't teach someone to program or reason in the spot, and the purpose of the interview never was to just answer the coding puzzle anyway. To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc). If I give you a puzzle and you paste the most optimized answer with no reasoning or comment you're not going to pass the interview, no matter if it's done with AI, from memory or with stack overflow. So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.

jusomg 2y ago
You could also learn a lot from what someone is asking an AI assistant. Someone asking: "solve this problem" vs "what is the difference between array and dict" vs "what is the time complexity of a hashmap add operation", etc. They give you different nuances on what the candidate knows and how it is approaching the understanding of the problem and its solution.
dist-epoch 2y ago
It's a new spin on the old leetcode problem - if you are good at leetcode you are not necessarily a good programmer for a company.
gjulianm 2y ago
> So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic. Candidates could also have an AI listening to the questions and giving them answers. There are other ways that they could be in the process without copy/pasting blindly. > To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc). Exactly, that's why I feel like saying "AI is not allowed" makes it all more clear. As interviewers we want to see these abilities you have, and if candidates use an AI it's harder to know what's them and what's the AI. It's not that we don't think AI is an useful tool, it's that it reduces the amount of signal we get in an interview; and in any case there's the assumption than the better someone performs the better they could use AI.

andy_ppp 2y ago

If your test can be done by an LLM maybe you shouldn't be hiring a human being based on that test...

npteljes 2y ago

Funny on the tin, but it makes complete sense to me. A sunglasses company would also ask me to take off my sunglasses during the job interview, presumably.

optimalsolver 2y ago
Thanks for the amusing mental image.

Daub 2y ago

Half way through a recent interview it became very apparent that the candidate was using AI. This was only apparent in the standard 'why are you interested in working here?' Questions. Once the questions became more AI resistant the candidate floundered. There English language skills and there general reasoning declined catastrophically. These question had originally been introduced to see see how good the candidate was at thinking abstractly. Example: 'what is your creative philosophy?'

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csomar 2y ago
> what is your creative philosophy? Seriously?
- Daub 2y ago
  Yep. Some candidates really enjoy the question to the point where it becomes difficult to get them to stop answering it.
  - MattSayar 2y ago
    Have you noticed a correlation in candidate quality vs the time spent answering that question?
    - Daub 2y ago
      > Have you noticed a correlation in candidate quality vs the time spent answering that question? Yes, certainly. Over the years our skill at interviewing has grown. We try to craft a balance between asking questions which require exact responses, and those which the candidate is free to improvise upon.
gameshot911 2y ago
>There English language skills... declined catastrophically. Let he who is without sin...

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>Why do you want to work at Anthropic? (We value this response highly - great answers are often 200-400 words.) Low lifes

skc 2y ago

AI for thee but not for me?

Applejinx 2y ago

Maybe they are ahead of the curve at finding that hiring people based on ability to exploit AI-augmented reach produces catastrophically bad results. If so, that's bad for their mission and marketing department, but it just puts them in the realm of a tobacco company, which can still be quite profitable so long as they don't offer health care insurance and free cigarettes to their employees :) I see no conflict of interest in their reasoning. They're just trying to screen out people who trust their product, presumably because they've had more experience than most with such people. Who would be more likely to attract AI-augmented job applicants and trust their apparent augmented skill than an AI company? They would have far more experience with this than most, because they'd be ground zero for NOT rejecting the idea.

leCaptain 2y ago

this is a reasonable request, provided there is a human on the other side who is going to read the 200-400 word response, and make a judgment call.

hinkley 2y ago

Prepping for an interview a couple weeks ago, I grabbed the latest version of IntelliJ. I wanted to set up a blank project with some tests, in case I got stuck and wanted to bail out of whatever app they hit me with and just have unit tests available. So lacking any other ideas for a sample project I just started implementing Fizzbuzz. And IntelliJ started auto suggesting the implementation. That seems more problematic than helpful, so it was a good thing I didn’t end up needing it.

Shamalamading 2y ago

On the face of it it's a reasonable request but the question itself is pointless. An applicants outside opinion on a company is pretty irrelevant and is subject to a lot of change after starting work.

ionwake 2y ago

TBH its motivated me to apply with AI to try somehow to get away with it. (I need to reevaluate my work load and priorities.)

commandersaki 2y ago

I'd be fine with this if they agree to not use AI to assess you as a candidate.

yapyap 2y ago

It’s cause they wanna use the data to train AI on and traininy AI on AI is useless.

jonsolo 2y ago

The goal of an interview is to assess talent. AI use gets in the way of that. If the goal were only to produce working code, or to write a quality essay, then sure use AI. But arguing that misunderstands the point of the interview process. Disclaimer: I work at Anthropic but these views are my own.

ulfw 2y ago

Beyond ridiculous. I am lacking words on how stupid this statement is coming from the AI company who enables all this crap.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

Funny this massive irony just out, as I don’t think I’ll renew my subscription with them because of R1.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

Aha: maybe they want to train their AI on their applicant’s / job seekers text submissions :D

yosito 2y ago

How much you wanna bet they're using AI to evaluate applicants and they don't even have a human reading 99% of the applications they're asking people to write? As someone who has recently applied to over 300 jobs, just to get form letter rejections, it's really hard to want to invest my time to hand-write an application that I know isn't even going to be read by a human.

thih9 2y ago

> We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system Is the application being reviewed with the help of an AI assistant though? If yes, AI mediation is still taking place.

autonomousErwin 2y ago

This probably means they are completely unable to differentiate between AI and non-AI else they would just discard the AI piles of applications.

gcanyon 2y ago

Everyone arguing for LLMs as a corrupting crutch needs to explain why this time is different: why the grammar-checkers-are-crutches, don't-use-wikipedia, spell-check-is-a-crutch, etc. etc. people were all wrong, but this time the tool really is somehow unacceptable.

DrNosferatu 2y ago
You forgot calculators ;)
- gcanyon 2y ago
  Definitely agreed. And slide rules, and log tables, and...
mrweasel 2y ago
It also depends on what you're hiring for. If you want a proofreader you probably want to test their abilities to both use a grammar checker, and work without it. For me the difference is that using an LLM requires a insane amount of work from the interviewer. Fair enough that you'd use Copilot day to day, but can you actually prompt it? Are you able to judge the quality of the output (or where you planning on just pawning that of to your code-reviewer). The spell checker is a good example, do you trust it blindly, or are you literate enough to spot when it makes mistakes? The "being able to spot the mistakes" is what an interviewer wants to know. Can you actually reason about a problem and sadly many cannot.

_heimdall 2y ago

The irony here is obvious, but what's interesting is that Anthropic is basically asking to not give then a realistic preview of how you will work. This feels similar to asking devs to only use vim during a coding challenge and please refrain from using VS Code or another full featured IDE. If you know, and even encourage, your employees to use LLMs at work you should want to see how well candidates present themselves in that same situation.

donohoe 2y ago
It’s hardly that. This is one component of an interview process - not all of it!
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I'm out of context here as I'm not applying to Anthropic, not surprised at all if I'm missing details of the full process! If this is just for a written part of the process or something, maybe I get it? But even then, if you expect employees to us LLMs I'd really want to see how well they interview with the LLMs available.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    There are parts of the interview that allow LLMs.
hmottestad 2y ago
I still don't know how to quit Vim without googling for instructions :P As an anecdote from my time at uni, I can share that all our exams were either writing code with pen on paper for 3-4 hours, or a take-home exam that would make up 50% of the final grade. There was never any expectation that students would use pen and paper on their take-home exams. You were free to use your books and to search the web for help, but you were not allowed to copy any code you found without citing it. Also not allowed to collaborate with anyone.

OutOfHere 2y ago

Whenever someone asks you to not do something that is victimless, you always should think about the power they are taking away from you, often unfairly. It is often the reason why they have power over you at all. By then doing that very thing, you regain your power, and so you absolutely should do it. I am not asking you to become a criminal, but to never be subservient to a corporation.

rock_artist 2y ago

So suddenly we're in a state where: - AI companies ask candidates to not "eat their own dog food" - AI companies blames each other of "copying" their IP while they find it legit to use "humans" IP for training.

mohsen1 2y ago

Pretty ironic that they use an automated system called CodeSignal that does the first round of the interviews

luke-stanley 2y ago

I'm sure Anthropic have too many applications submitted that are obviously AI generated, and I am sure what they mean by "non-AI-assisted communication", they don't want "slop" applications, that sounds like a LLM wrote it. They want some greater proof of human ability. I expect humans at Anthropic can tell what LLM model was used to rewrite (or polish) applications they get, but if they can't, a basic BERT classifier can (I've trained one for this task, it's not so hard).

farceSpherule 2y ago

So I guess people should not use other available tools? Spell checker? Grammar checker? The Internet? Grammarly? The issue is that they are receiving excellent responses from everyone and can no longer discriminate against people who are not good at writing.

trollbridge 2y ago

This strikes me as similar to job applicants who apply for a position and are told it's hybrid or in-office - and then on the day of the interview, it suddenly changes from one in-person to one held over a videoconference, with the other participants with backdrops that look suspiciously like they're working from home.

dhfbshfbu4u3 2y ago

Cool. Does that mean Anthropic is not using ATS to scan resumes? Of course it doesn’t…

layer8 2y ago

Plot twist: They are actually looking for the freethinkers who are subversive enough to still use AI assistants.

snakeyjake 2y ago

At least someone realizes the soulless unimaginative mediocrity machine makes people sound soulless, unimaginative, and mediocre.

wosined 2y ago

Only if they stop screening us with their shitty AI first.

wosined 2y ago

Only if they stop screening us with their shitty AI first. Otherwise it is slop vs slop.

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nunez 2y ago

This feels very similar to ophthalmologists who make their money pushing LASIK while refusing to get it done on themselves or their relatives. "This procedure is life-changing! But..." Anyway, bring back in-person interviews! That's the only way to work around this Pandora's Box they themselves opened.

ccourtenay 2y ago

You want to work at an AI company that does not allow the use of AI by it's future employees. That is likely enough said right there. Keep looking for a company that has it's head screwed on straight.

hcarvalhoalves 2y ago

That's hilarious. A comedy script couldn't beat real life in 2025.

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chuckro84 2y ago

The HR are probably using AI to waste our time with their ridiculously worded job descriptions and now you can have a computer respond... You have simply completed the circle of stupidity. If they are upset you have sidestepped putting yourself inside their circle, maybe there is a better place to work after all...