A recent Fortune article reports that a cofounder of Anthropic says studying the humanities will be “more important than ever” as AI systems continue to advance. The article links this claim directly to hiring priorities. The article explains that the company looks for people who can “explain themselves well, and work with others well,” noting that, communication and interaction skills matter alongside technical ability. She adds that while AI models are strong at “STEM-ish reasoning,” understanding “what it means to be human—history, how we interact, how we relate” will remain valuable.
Read closely, these remarks reveal how the humanities are being operationalized at the point where values become criteria. They appear less as a field of inquiry than as a proxy for interpersonal skills, expressive clarity, and collaborative competence. “Critical thinking” is implicitly equated with the ability to explain oneself well. “Working with others well” becomes the relevant form of social understanding, implicitly as a basis for productive collaboration.
The reference to “STEM-ish reasoning” sounds like a sympathetic acknowledgment of disciplinary difference, but it quietly reproduces the positivist assumptions that structure much tech culture. Technical reasoning is prvileged as the locus of rigor: formal, exacting, and epistemically primary. The humanities are positioned as compensatory, valuable for what they contribute around the edges of systems whose epistemic core is already presumed to be technical.
The phrase “what it means to be human” gestures toward depth while remaining deliberately vague. This language is familiar in AI discourse, where appeals to humanity often function as legitimation rather than as an epistemic problem. The resonance is hard to miss in a company whose very name invokes the human as a grounding reference point, even as the systems being built increasingly reorganize what explanation, authorship, and understanding look like in practice.
This framing overlooks the long humanistic critique of humanism itself. Posthumanist strands of the humanities interrogate how the human has been historically produced, how it authorizes particular forms of knowledge, and how appeals to humanity can obscure asymmetries of power. That work does not register easily when “understanding what it means to be human” is reduced to communication skill and social intuition.
This narrowing aligns with organizational environments in which value must be legible and assessable. What resists this translation are forms of inquiry that ask why certain explanations count as legitimate, how authority attaches to particular ways of speaking, or how evaluative frameworks come to feel natural rather than constructed. The humanities are welcomed where they support articulation and coordination, and constrained where they would interrogate the epistemic ground on which those judgments rest.
“Modern, universal man is man in a hurry, he has no time, he is a prisoner of necessity, he does not understand that a thing need have no use; Nor does he understand that fundamentally it is the useful thing that can become a useless and overwhelming burden. If one cannot understand the usefulness of the useless, and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art; and a country in which art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots, a country of unhappy people, who neither laugh nor smile, a country without mind or spirit; where there is no humour, where there is no laughter, there is anger and hatred.” - Eugène Ionesco