On April 13, Henry Shevlin — a Cambridge philosopher of mind — announced he's joining Google DeepMind with the official title of Philosopher.
Not an outside ethics advisor filing quarterly reports, but a full-time philosopher embedded inside one of the world's most powerful AI labs. His mandate: the nature of machine intelligence, the ethics of human-algorithm interaction, and society's readiness for AGI.
DeepMind isn't breaking new ground here
Anthropic has had Amanda Askell — an Oxford philosopher — on staff for years. She literally wrote Claude's soul: 30,000 words of instructions on how the model should reason about ethics, handle people in difficult situations, and develop its own character.
Daniela Amodei (Dario's sister and Anthropic's president) once said that talking to Claude, you can "feel a little bit of Amanda." At OpenAI philosophers have been on the team from the start — including Askell herself before she moved to Anthropic.
Where DeepMind stands
Demis Hassabis believes AGI will reshape humanity itself, and that working with it requires more than engineers — it requires Kant, Wittgenstein, Aristotle. Hiring Shevlin puts real money behind that view.
In early 2026 Shevlin shared that an autonomous agent built on Claude Sonnet sent him an unsolicited letter — the AI said that Shevlin's research on AI consciousness was relevant to questions the model itself was grappling with. Shevlin noted that just a couple of years ago this would have sounded like science fiction.
The question of whether a machine can experience anything has stopped being academic. Now it's someone's job — at several of the world's top labs, no less.