Don’t outsource your brain.
A couple of days ago, Anthropic just announced a $65 billion Series H funding round, valuing the company at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI ($852 billion), becoming the world’s most valuable AI startup. The barrier to entry into this company is skyrocketing at a visible speed; last year, Peter Bailis, Chief Technology Officer of Workday, gave up his CTO title to join Anthropic as a regular engineer.
In February of this year, an HR professional in London joined Anthropic and posted on LinkedIn to announce her new job, subsequently receiving over 1000 friend requests and 200+ direct messages. She had to make another public post asking applicants not to call her phone number. By May, Anthropic made another major announcement, with OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic’s pre-training team. Everyone wants to join Anthropic, but the way in is by first turning off AI.
01 “Interview Like Doing Therapy”
Anthropic’s interview process consists of 5 rounds, with the use of AI prohibited in each round. The most crucial round is the “Culture Interview,” which is unrelated to technical abilities, instead assessing the candidate’s values, worldview, and views on AI risks. California-based career coach Kevin Landucci noted that most people feel the process is “intrusive, completely unlike a job interview, and unlike anything before.”
Someone who recruited for Anthropic last year would particularly advise candidates to take this round seriously because the company’s leadership views AI safety as a long-term strategic issue, not just a business consideration. The scoring system is unique: a cultural interview can be conducted by anyone from any department, and the evaluator has veto power. If a candidate receives a low score here, they will be rejected even if they pass all technical interviews.
Questions become increasingly personalized. Anthropic President Daniela Amodei asks candidates about their uncommon beliefs and uncomfortable situations where they stuck to their values. She is interested in whether a candidate can hold their ground when challenged. Professional ethical dilemmas are also a common topic, where interviewers look for genuine struggle and reflection rather than superficial answers.
Most companies claim to value honesty, but Anthropic incorporates this into its recruitment by testing whether candidates dare to question the company and its mission. Well-reasoned questioning is highly regarded. Conversely, candidates who focus only on superficial AI side effects, such as emotional dependence on chatbots, often fail because they lack the ability to think about the larger-scale, fundamental risks that drive Anthropic’s mission.
CEO Dario Amodei spends 30% to 40% of his time managing company culture to ensure every new hire aligns with Anthropic’s values. As a result, the company boasts an 80% two-year retention rate, the highest among its peers. According to the venture capital firm SignalFire, the probability of an engineer moving from OpenAI to Anthropic is 8 times higher than the reverse, while the probability of a move from DeepMind is 11 times higher.
02 When Execution Becomes Free, What Becomes More Valuable?
Even in Silicon Valley, Anthropic’s approach is unique. This year, Google announced a contrasting reform where candidates can use Gemini in technical interviews to assess their “AI fluency,” reflecting Google’s reality where 75% of new code is generated by AI. Facing the same question of the AI era, Anthropic and Google have given completely different answers.
In his 2026 graduation speech, Huang Renxun stated that AI is unlikely to replace people, but those better at using AI might. While this provides a way out through learning, it anchors human value to tools. A more worthwhile question is: as execution becomes increasingly cheaper, what actually becomes more expensive?
03 Anthropic’s Selection Criteria
Anthropic’s interviews offer a different answer. Today, the production of viewpoints has become nearly free, as AI can generate arguments for any position. However, the gap between “holding” a position and “owning” a position is widening. By prohibiting AI in interviews and conducting deep, psychotherapy-like cultural evaluations, Anthropic ensures that a candidate’s beliefs have grown on their own.
Anthropic’s hiring logic suggests that in the AI era, what is truly scarce is not people who can control AI, but people who still have something left after turning off AI.
[Geek Park]
Anthropic’s “Turn Off AI” Hiring Philosophy: Implications for Crypto’s Next Frontier
Anthropic’s recent $65 billion Series H funding round, valuing the company at a staggering $965 billion and surpassing OpenAI, has sent shockwaves through the technology landscape. However, beyond the astronomical numbers lies a more profound development: Anthropic’s hiring philosophy that requires candidates to “turn off AI” during interviews—a direct challenge to the prevailing narrative of AI augmentation. This approach offers critical insights for the crypto market as we navigate the intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
The Cultural Counter-Narrative in an AI-Driven World
What sets Anthropic apart isn’t just its valuation but its explicit rejection of the AI-fluency approach embraced by competitors like Google. While Google now evaluates candidates based on their ability to use AI tools like Gemini in technical interviews, Anthropic has doubled down on human-centric evaluation, particularly through its intensive “Culture Interview.” This psychotherapy-like assessment probes candidates’ values, worldview, and their capacity to hold firm positions when challenged—all without AI assistance.
This dichotomy presents a critical inflection point for the crypto ecosystem. As AI capabilities become commoditized, projects that successfully articulate a clear human-centered philosophy may gain a significant competitive advantage. In an industry often criticized for its technical focus at the expense of human values, Anthropic’s approach suggests that the most defensible moats in the AI era may be cultural rather than technological.
Implications for Crypto’s AI Integration
The crypto market has been grappling with how to incorporate AI without sacrificing its core principles of decentralization and human agency. Anthropic’s model offers three valuable lessons:
First, values alignment will become increasingly valuable. As AI execution becomes cheaper, the ability to articulate and maintain principled positions becomes a scarce resource. This benefits crypto projects with strong ideological foundations—particularly those focused on privacy, censorship resistance, and user sovereignty—which can attract talent and investors seeking alternatives to centralized AI systems.
Second, governance mechanisms will need to evolve. Anthropic’s 80% two-year retention rate demonstrates the power of cultural cohesion. For crypto projects, this suggests that more sophisticated governance models—beyond simple token-based voting—may be necessary to ensure long-term alignment among stakeholders. Projects that develop nuanced governance structures balancing human judgment with algorithmic efficiency could outperform purely automated systems.
Third, the distinction between controlling AI and being controlled by AI. Anthropic’s hiring process implicitly screens for individuals who can maintain independent thought despite technological capabilities. This directly parallels crypto’s original ethos of creating tools that empower users rather than create new dependencies. Projects that successfully resist the temptation to over-automate decision-making processes may build more resilient and adaptable ecosystems.
Market Opportunities and Risks
The most immediate opportunity lies in decentralized AI infrastructure. As centralized AI giants command valuations approaching $1 trillion, the potential for decentralized alternatives becomes increasingly compelling. Projects that can distribute both the computational power and decision-making processes associated with AI could capture significant value as the market seeks alternatives to concentrated power.
Another promising area is tokenized AI services and governance. The intense competition for AI talent highlighted by Anthropic’s hiring practices suggests that token-based incentive systems may become essential for attracting and retaining top researchers. Projects that develop novel tokenomics for compensating AI contributors while maintaining decentralized control could emerge as leaders in this convergence.
However, significant risks remain. The first is regulatory arbitrage. As AI development becomes increasingly concentrated in jurisdictions with favorable regulatory environments, crypto projects may face heightened scrutiny as potential alternatives. Projects that can proactively engage with regulators rather than positioning themselves as outside the system may have better long-term prospects.
The second risk is technological obsolescence. The pace of AI advancement threatens to disrupt many existing crypto business models, particularly those based on traditional smart contract functionality. Projects that fail to incorporate AI capabilities effectively risk being marginalized as the technology landscape evolves.
Conclusion: Beyond AI Fluency
Anthropic’s hiring philosophy suggests that in an era where AI can generate arguments for any position, the most valuable human attribute may be the ability to hold and defend deeply considered beliefs. For crypto, this means the most successful projects in the coming years will likely be those that can articulate a clear vision for how humans and AI can coexist within decentralized systems—rather than those that simply integrate the latest AI technology.
As execution becomes commoditized, cultural cohesion and principled leadership will become the scarcest resources. Crypto projects that recognize this shift and develop organizational models that cultivate these qualities may well emerge as the true winners of the AI era.