Anthropic’s co-founder, Daniela Amodei, revealed that her company prioritizes human qualities like communication and empathy over technical skills for new hires. She believes humanities will become increasingly vital as AI advances, emphasizing that “humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work.

Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic—the company whose recent AI updates triggered a nearly trillion-dollar selloff in enterprise software stocks—says the qualities her company values most in new hires aren’t technical. They’re human. In an interview with ABC News that aired on Saturday, Amodei said Anthropic looks for “great communicators” with “excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people.” Not exactly the job description you’d expect from a company that just spooked Salesforce, Microsoft and Workday investors with its latest AI model.Amodei, who studied literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before working as a Capitol Hill staffer and later co-founding Anthropic with her brother Dario, said studying the humanities will be “more important than ever” as AI continues to reshape the job market.“A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM,” she said. “But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human—understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick—I think that will always be really, really important.”

Why soft skills are the new hard skills in the age of AI

Her comments come at a moment when Anthropic’s influence on markets is hard to ignore. Just days after a minor update triggered a massive tech stock selloff, the company debuted Claude Opus 4.6, an advanced AI model with autonomous agent capabilities. OpenAI piled on with its own coding assistant release, deepening fears about AI displacing traditional business software.Yet Amodei pushed back against the idea that AI will simply replace people. She called the number of jobs AI could do entirely without humans “vanishingly small,” adding that she believes “humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work.”

Top CEOs are echoing the same message

She’s not alone in that view. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has urged young professionals to lean into critical thinking and communication skills. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said emotional intelligence is becoming more important as AI handles analytical tasks. And IBM’s former CEO Ginni Rometty told Fortune that generative AI will put a premium on collaboration and judgment.The takeaway? In a world where AI can code, the people who can think, write and connect may have the real edge.