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It’s hard to find a job. In today’s labor market, prospective applicants are inundated with spam job offers, filtered out by AI–powered HR bots, interviewed by large language models (LLMs), and forced to navigate job boards packed with ghost listings. If you’re a tech-savvy job seeker applying to gigs in the AI-space, no one could blame you for using an AI assistant to even the playing field.
Or at least, in a stunningly dark irony, no one except AI companies themselves: this week, a sharp-eyed AI critic noticed a wild detail on job postings by Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief competitor and the creator of Claude: “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.”
It’s hypocrisy at its finest. CEOs and managers are chomping at the bit to replace human workers with cost-cutting AI bots like Claude, which Anthropic brags can partner with HR platforms for the purpose of “revolutionizing talent evaluation with AI.”
Of course, whether or not AI actually can replace workers is another story — our current generation of LLMs are prone to rambling incoherently, generating bizarre slop, breaking previously useful websites, and fabricating news reporting.
But it’s also the principle of the thing. Why is it okay for Anthropic to develop AI, profit off it, hire with it, maybe even replace my job with it — but not for me to use it when I need to find a new one?
Much ink has been spilled about the dangers of AI to the labor force — how it could automate your job, your boss’ job, their boss’ job. But as time goes on, it’s becoming more clear that the problem facing workers isn’t simply “automation” — it’s an increasingly unregulated labor market snowballing with AI-solutionism at every turn.
Take the job search. As large language models (LLMs) become more ubiquitous, it’s now possible to send out thousands of applications per day. That’s a welcome advantage given that one out of every five job listings are said to be fake, but in turn recruiters are being overwhelmed with applications, so they’re turning to — what else? — AI to sort through the noise.
It’s already been reported that 99 percent of fortune 500 companies are likely using AI to sort applications for interviews — a worrying figure when considering that existing AI is prone to replicating racial and gender bias found within its training data.
But that’s just the start. Busy with thousands of AI applications, recruiters are increasingly trusting AI with the interviews themselves; in a 2024 survey, 43 percent of companies reported they planned to or were already using AI to interview applicants.
As both sides of the hiring line increasingly turn to AI in our unbalanced job market, it should fall on the corporations doing the hiring to set the ethical standard — or else find themselves buried in an avalanche of slop.
More on AI and labor: A Key Trump Goal Emerges: Replacing Human Jobs With AI
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