Philosophers call for their journals to require conflict of interest disclosures

Philosophy has long been the punchline to jokes about unemployable majors. Now, philosophers may be getting the last laugh as frontier artificial intelligence (AI) firms increasingly are shelling out eye-watering salaries for their help in tackling some of the technology’s thorniest questions. Many philosophers welcome the growing demand—which extends beyond AI as industry seeks philosophical guidance on issues ranging from climate change to misinformation. But some argue the discipline’s norms have failed to keep pace. Unlike most scientific disciplines, for example, philosophy journals rarely require authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest such as industry ties. That’s why an open letter released today calls on the field’s journals to begin to mandate such disclosures. Authors should be required to report any industry funding, paid employment or consulting deals, personal investments, and personal relationships with employees of relevant companies, states the letter, which has so far gained more than 200 signatories—among them luminaries such as Harvard University’s Naomi Oreskes. The move is needed, it argues, to “protect the integrity” of philosophy research “in a rapidly changing world.” “We expect doctors to disclose, we expect politicians to disclose, and of course scientists and researchers too,” says Craig Callender, a co-organizer of the petition who is a philosopher of science at the University of California (UC) San Diego and president of the Philosophy of Science Association. “Why not philosophers?” “This, to me, is an absolute no-brainer,” adds Anna Alexandrova, a philosopher of science at the University of Cambridge. “It is frankly bizarre that we didn’t have such norms of openness declaration before.” One of humanity’s oldest disciplines, philosophy’s conceptual nature has historically kept it at arm’s length from industry. That gap is closing. “In the last 5 years, there’s been much, much more connection between industry and philosophy,” says Cailin O’Connor, a philosopher of science at UC Irvine who co-led the creation of the petition with Callender. Frontier AI companies have been among the most visible drivers of that shift. Anthropic, for example, tasks its in-house team of philosophers with Claude’s constitution: a 78-page document that dictates the chatbot’s behavior. Beyond direct employment, however, philosophers also work with industry through a growing web of consulting, grants, and fellowships. The relationships are often mutually beneficial. Industry partnerships can provide researchers with valuable access to proprietary data sets. They also offer a chance to see how ideas developed in academia can shape real-world products and policy, and they yield research that higher impact platforms are often eager to publish. But the relationships can also become a slippery slope, O’Connor says. Companies are ultimately trying to build products and generate profits, she notes, and partnerships with respected academics can lend legitimacy to those efforts, a dynamic she calls the “weaponization of reputation.” Enough industry funding can even reshape a field’s overall research agenda. Tobacco companies, for example, infamously funded research into alternative causes of lung cancer such as asbestos—diluting the pool of evidence without necessarily changing individual researchers’ conclusions. “They don’t give people money and say, ‘OK, do a fraud[ulent] study,’” O’Connor says. “They give them money, and they say, ‘You’re a person who’s working on X topic. That’s a great topic that we want more people to work on, and we’re going to fund you to keep working on that topic, to have conferences, to have more students, to publish more papers.’” Organizers argue similar dynamics could emerge in philosophy. A social media company, for example, might fund work that shifts attention from misinformation to questions about whether content moderation violates free speech. Fossil fuel companies might support philosophical debates about carbon credits, distracting from efforts to end the use of fossil fuels. Mel Andrews, a postdoctoral researcher studying philosophy of science and technology at Princeton University, thinks the rush of AI money is already encouraging a focus on questions AI developers are eager to promote. Among them: Could AI be conscious? Does a chatbot deserve rights? To Andrews, the industry is “very clearly, on its face, … asking a ridiculous nonphilosophical question” that might serve companies’ commercial interests by portraying today’s AIs as closer to so-called superintelligence than they actually may be—while diverting attention from more immediate questions about its societal impacts. Some philosophers may find it hard to accept that their field could be influenced by financial interests, Alexandrova says. Philosophers have long embraced what she calls an “exceptionalist” view of their discipline—the idea that, unlike the sciences, philosophy is “pure” and immune from the social forces that shape research elsewhere. That view may be getting harder to sustain as research funding tightens and the academic job market remains difficult. “We partly choose the puzzles [we study] based on what is calling our philosophical hearts, but we also partly choose based on what is trendy and where we think we can get funding,” Andrews says. That makes the petition especially timely, they and others say. Because conflict-of-interest reporting is unfamiliar to many philosophers, the letter proposes journals give authors a standardized checklist that asks about funding, employment, collaborations, and other relevant relationships, then publish those disclosures alongside papers. It also urges journals to add disclosures to previously published work and to establish policies for failures to disclose, including corrections or retractions when necessary. Matthew Liao, a bioethicist at New York University who signed the letter, says he views the open letter not as an effort to “name and shame,” but as a way to strengthen academic norms. “In academia, we care about what’s really true, and we don’t want it to be obscured or biased because of financial ties,” he says. “Disclosure doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong.” Supporters acknowledge implementation may not be straightforward. One concern is whether disclosure will create an obstacle for philosophy journals’ longstanding tradition of triple-blind peer review, where authors, reviews, and journal handling editors all remain anonymous to one another. Others argue the disclosures should extend beyond journals to conferences, professional societies, and university departments—and that future reforms should also address funding from private philanthropies, whose influence can resemble that of industry. For Callender, the letter marks only the beginning of the road ahead. “Philosophy needs to grow up as a field,” Callender says. “It’s time to be a little more savvy and contemporary about industry disclosure.”