The short version: the format is changing, but the purpose isn't. An interview exists to measure your judgment and communication — so the honest way to prepare is to build real fundamentals and to prepare for whatever format the company actually runs. Using AI to study is one of the best things to happen to interview prep. Using it covertly to fake a live round is cheating, and it backfires. Those are different acts, and the difference is the whole point of this post.
We're an interview-prep school, and our bias is openly stated: we want you to actually get good, not to game a screen. With that out of the way, here's the landscape in 2026.
What actually changed
Three things are true at once, and people keep mixing them up:
| Reality | What it is | Is it OK? |
|---|---|---|
| Studying with AI | Using an assistant before the interview as a tutor, hint-giver, mock interviewer | ✅ Yes — and encouraged |
| A sanctioned AI-assisted round | A company explicitly hands you an AI tool and grades how you collaborate with it | ✅ Yes — it's the company's own test |
| Covert use in a normal round | Secretly using AI where the interviewer hasn't allowed it | ❌ No — this is cheating |
Some companies have moved some rounds into the second category, deciding that "can you work effectively with an assistant" is worth measuring directly. Others have moved hard in the opposite direction. Which is why the next section exists.
Which companies allow AI in interviews?
There is no industry-wide rule, and anyone telling you there is has not checked. Policy varies by company and — this is the part people miss — by stage: the same employer can encourage an assistant on a take-home and forbid it in a live round.
Here is what I could verify from a primary or named source. Every row links the source and carries its date, because this is a fast-moving area and a claim without a date is worthless.
| Company | Stated position | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Canva | Expects it. "We now expect Backend, Machine Learning and Frontend engineering candidates to use AI tools like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude during our technical interviews." A new "AI-Assisted Coding" competency replaces the traditional CS-fundamentals screen for backend and frontend roles. | Canva engineering blog, Simon Newton, 11 Jun 2025 |
| Meta | Allowing it in some coding interviews. Reported from internal communications: the change is justified as "more representative of the developer environment that our future employees will work in," with staff asked to run trial interviews using AI tools. | 404 Media, Jason Koebler, 29 Jul 2025 |
| Banned it in virtual interviews, per a company spokesperson, alongside a stated preference for bringing candidates on-site earlier in the process. | Computerworld, Lucas Mearian, 26 Aug 2025 | |
| Cisco | Off-limits unless invited. "If a candidate is not explicitly invited to use AI during the assessment process, then it should be considered off-limits," alongside added verification steps that may include an in-person component. | Same, 26 Aug 2025 |
| McKinsey | Emphasises that "face-to-face interactions are necessary to assess the human qualities that can't be automated." | Same, 26 Aug 2025 |
Read the table again and notice the shape of it: the two clearest positions point in opposite directions. Canva rewrote its rubric to grade AI collaboration; Google banned the tools and started pulling people on-site. Both are reasonable responses to the same pressure, and both were public within eleven weeks of each other.
So the useful conclusion is not "the industry is moving to AI-assisted interviews." It is that you cannot infer your round's rules from a headline, and the cost of guessing wrong is the offer.
One statistic, and why I am hedging it
The pressure behind all this is real. CodeSignal reported that cheating and fraud attempt rates on its proctored assessments "more than doubled, rising from 16 percent in 2024 to 35 percent," with entry-level rates jumping from 15 percent to 40 percent (press release, 25 Feb 2026).
Treat that with the caution it deserves: CodeSignal sells fraud-detection products, and the release does not disclose that interest. It measures attempts its own systems flagged, on its own platform, which is not the same as an industry rate. I include it because the direction is corroborated by the hiring behaviour in the table above, not because the number is independent.
I also left out a widely-quoted figure about the share of recruiters who have returned to in-person interviews. It appears in the Computerworld piece attributed to Gartner, but with no survey name and no date beyond "recent" — so I cannot tell you when it was measured or of whom, and neither can anyone else repeating it.
(We cover how to prepare for a sanctioned AI round in AI-assisted coding interviews at FAANG.) Most live rounds are still the classic format. The shift is real but partial, which is exactly why you have to know which test you're sitting.
Is using AI in a coding interview cheating?
Only when you use it against the stated rules of that round. On an unproctored take-home, using AI is usually fine (assume you'll defend every line later). In a sanctioned AI-assisted round, it's required. In a normal live round where the interviewer hasn't okayed it, secretly leaning on AI is cheating — and it tends to fail you twice: interviewers increasingly spot the tells (a long pause, then a burst of flawless code you can't modify when they ask a follow-up), and even if you slip through, you've signed up for a job you may not be able to do.
The one-line rule that removes all ambiguity: ask the recruiter, in writing, "Am I allowed to use AI assistants during this interview?" No reasonable company penalizes the question.
Ask it per round, not per company. That is the single most useful sentence in this post, and the table above is why: policy splits by stage as readily as by employer. An organisation can hand you an assistant for a take-home and forbid it in the live round two weeks later, and neither position is inconsistent — they are measuring different things. "They said AI was fine" is not a policy; it is a memory of one conversation about one stage.
Get the answer in writing, and if the recruiter is unsure, ask them to confirm with the hiring manager before the round rather than after it.
Why the honest path is also the better path
Here's the part the "shortcut" crowd misses: the skills that survive the AI era are the ones you can't fake.
- Fundamentals — when you're in a no-AI live round (still the majority), patterns, data structures, and complexity analysis are all you have.
- Problem decomposition & communication — even in AI-assisted rounds, the grade is on how you frame the problem, steer the tool, and catch its mistakes. Weak fundamentals make you a worse AI operator, not a better one.
- Verification judgment — knowing when generated code is wrong is now a first-class skill. You only get it by having solved enough problems yourself.
Faking the screen optimizes for the one moment you most want to skip; building the skill optimizes for the job you're trying to get.
How to prepare for each format
- Classic live round: practice the old-fashioned way — solve out loud, talk through trade-offs, no tools. (Our free study-plan tool builds you a schedule for exactly this.)
- Take-home: use AI the way you would at work, but be able to walk through and defend every decision on a follow-up call.
- Sanctioned AI-assisted round: practice the workflow — decomposing an ambiguous prompt, driving the assistant in small steps, reading every diff, and verifying with tests. (We cover the study side of this in How to use AI for coding interview prep — note that's about studying, not in-interview shortcuts.)
The skill the new formats are actually testing
Worth naming, because it is the one thing every position in that table agrees on.
When Canva says it grades "how candidates leverage AI strategically — clarifying requirements, reviewing AI-generated code critically, identifying issues, and ensuring production-quality solutions," it is describing reading code you did not write and deciding whether to trust it. When Google pulls candidates on-site instead, it is protecting its ability to watch you reason unaided. Those are two ways of measuring the same underlying thing: judgment that does not come from the tool.
That skill is also the one that survives whichever way the policy lands. It is worth practising directly — take a generated solution to a problem you have already solved yourself, and find what is wrong with it. There is almost always something: an unhandled edge case, a complexity claim that does not hold, a variable name that quietly means something different from what it says. Do that fifty times and you have built the exact competency both camps are trying to measure.
Where to go next in this cluster
- How to prepare for AI-assisted coding interviews at FAANG — the workflow for a sanctioned round: decomposing an ambiguous prompt, driving the assistant in small steps, verifying every diff.
- Using AI for coding interview prep — the study side, which is unambiguously allowed and which most people underuse.
- The 16 coding interview patterns — because in a no-AI live round, which is still the majority, recognition and fundamentals are all you have.
Bottom line
The AI era didn't make interviews easier to fake; it made the fundamentals and your judgment more valuable, because that's the part a tool can't supply. The policies are genuinely split — one company rewrote its rubric to grade AI collaboration, another banned the tools and brought people back on-site, both within three months. So stop trying to read the industry and read your own round: ask, in writing, per stage. Then prepare for the format you are actually sitting.
I re-check the policy table when the sources move. Get the updates by email — one message per post, nothing else.
Written by Amit Singh — Senior SDE at Amazon, Claude Certified Architect, and the instructor at AlgoEngineer. We run live, instructor-led cohorts focused on genuine skill, not shortcuts — see the live DSA cohort.