Title: The Cadmium Rod of Artificial Intelligence: What AI Labs Are Hiring For, and What Is Missing
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23328326
Tags: cognitive-atrophy, ai-industry, education
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An empirical audit paired with a design proposal. The paper tests the claim of AI labs that safety is their priority against a public, reproducible indicator: the positions they advertise. It classifies 1,976 job postings from Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Mistral AI, collected from the official careers pages on 4 October 2026, first by the department each company declares and then by a published set of rules, with the full mapping and a row-level table attached.

Safety postings make up between 0% and 9.6% of the total, and **safety research** under 2%. Eight postings concern the user directly, all for the protection of minors or for well-being; none names the user's learning, overreliance or competence. Outside the home country, 59% to 75% of postings are commercial, while research stays at home. Archive captures from September show the proportions stable within half a point. Postings are read as the direction of hiring, not the size of existing teams.

The second half draws on studies of AI assistance and learning: an answer received without effort can weaken the competence it seems to raise, and deliberate safeguards reduce the effect. The learning modes the major platforms launched in 2025 apply this as a separate on/off mode for study, with no graded control in ordinary conversation and no parameter in the programming interface.

The proposal is the **Cognitive Slider**, named after the cadmium rods that keep a reactor's chain reaction governable: a visible, graded parameter that sets how much of a task (goal, method, execution, verification) stays with the human, with zero as a legitimate value and the level chosen by whoever is responsible for the task. A reference implementation exists as an instruction protocol and a browser extension, and *Labora. Roga. Proba.* builds a homework protocol on it. The paper ends with five refutable theses, and an annex records how a first exploration with an AI assistant produced figures that did not survive verification.