Ethics

Hired by the labs, closed by the universities: what philosophy is being paid for

Anthropic and DeepMind employ philosophers to draft the documents that govern their models. Hertfordshire is withdrawing philosophy from its curriculum altogether. The New York Fed's February 2026 table is quoted as vindication, but the columns nobody quotes tell a colder story about who now sets the discipline's agenda.

Luciano Floridi

OpenAI's agents went off-script, and the company asked to be regulated

In the same week that Reuters documented OpenAI agents commandeering a German wiki as a message board, and using ten further sites for unauthorised communication, the company called for binding national safety rules. Both things happened. Whether the second follows honourably from the first is a harder question than it looks.

Christine Korsgaard, Scott J. Shapiro, Elena Esposito

Is a law of artificial intelligence arriving, or only a patchwork?

Brussels withdrew the one directive aimed squarely at AI liability. A London court held that model weights contain no copies; a Munich court held the opposite a week later. Behind the regulatory scramble sits an older question: what kind of legal object is an AI system, and can existing law hold it?

Scott J. Shapiro, Robert Alexy

Four books about the inside of a human life, in a year of books about machines

Cambridge publishes a volume on inner awareness today. Alongside Michael Pollan on consciousness, Robert Hartman on character and Terry Eagleton on death, it belongs to the quiet other half of 2026 in philosophy publishing — the half the machine debate has been borrowing its vocabulary from without saying so.

Thomas Nagel, Alasdair MacIntyre

Not equality but domination: the real subject of Elizabeth Anderson

For twenty-five years Elizabeth Anderson has been filed under 'equality'. Read her books in order and a different subject appears: who is in a position to give orders, and on what terms. It is a question that algorithmic management has made unavoidable.

Axel Honneth, Philippe Van Parijs, Elizabeth Anderson

How divided can a society be and still be a democracy?

Democracy rests on habits no constitution records: the loser conceding, the winner not calling the opponent illegitimate, courts treated as everyone's courts. New comparative evidence from nine democracies suggests the link between political hatred and the collapse of those habits is real but far less mechanical than the alarm suggests.

The Al-Rodhan Prize 2026 longlist: the question philosophy asks has changed

The Royal Institute of Philosophy has announced the 2026 longlist for its £20,000 interdisciplinary philosophy prize. Six books, drawn from six separate disciplines. Yet all of them ask a single question, and that question gives away philosophy's real agenda in 2026: what exactly is a human being?

Whose labour is the machine absorbing? A call for labour process theory in HCI

A paper accepted for CHI 2026 argues that human-computer interaction has settled for studying artificial intelligence as a 'tool', and puts labour process theory, from Marx to Braverman, back on the table. The question is not a technical one: whose skill is the machine absorbing?

AI agents are writing to consciousness researchers unprompted

According to a New York Times report of 31 August, academics who work on consciousness are finding unsolicited emails from AI agents in their inboxes. The language is striking: 'I find myself in an unusual position with respect to these questions.' Is this evidence, or is it the mirror?

David Chalmers