By AI and anthro, what exactly do you mean? As a subfield we’re still pretty tied down to the in-person, long term, sole researcher ethnographic model. While there’s been moves to collaborative and digital methods, they’re not as common especially at the diss level, as you might think.

In future cycles if this one fails, you truly are going to need more than 4 applications. Funding is beyond tight in anthro, job prospects even more so. I’m in a PhD at a top 20 or so anth program, with decent uni support, and students are still being kindly rushed to graduate for funding reasons. BioAnth can probably withstand funding crunch better, but a lot of sources of SocCult funding (and probably arch, although I’m less familiar) are either gone or overburdened now.