Industry R&D
Research Counsel
Anthropic
San Francisco, CA +1
Description
About Anthropic
Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.
About the role
As a member of the Research Legal team, you'll advise on legal topics across the full lifecycle of building and studying frontier AI models: data acquisition and use, training pipelines, model evaluation and launch, and alignment, interpretability, model welfare, societal impacts, and beneficial deployments research, as well as Responsible Scaling Policy work on biological risk. You'll be a subject matter expert on copyright, privacy, data use, and AI regulation (including the EU AI Act, U.S. state laws, and emerging global rules), and will work directly with researchers on questions that often have no settled answer.
The ideal candidate will have navigated complex legal questions at the intersection of machine learning, data, and academic research in a fast-moving technical environment, with the judgment to work at the cutting edge of AI development while effectively solving issues, enabling innovation, and calibrating risk. This is a uniquely positioned role touching many different facets of AI, presenting the opportunity to be a leader in AI legal thought.
Key responsibilities
- Advise research and data teams on data sourcing, licensing, partnerships, and use, and help shape Anthropic's data acquisition and use strategy as laws and markets evolve
- Help coordinate regulatory readiness and model launches, review model documentation and system cards, respond to regulatory inquiries, and advise on legal questions for pre-release and internal models
- Support the Responsible Scaling Policy as applied to biological and chemical risk, including capability evaluations, tiered access for biosecurity researchers, and dual-use research questions
- Counsel the Societal Impacts, Economic, Alignment, Interpretability, Model Welfare, and Beneficial Deployments teams on research design, data collection and sharing, external collaborations, program launches, and publication review
- Monitor global AI, privacy, copyright, and export-control developments and translate them into practical internal guidance and policy, working closely with Product, Policy, and other legal stakeholders
- Engage with academics, regulators, industry groups, and civil society to help develop norms and best practices for responsible AI development and data governance
Minimum qualifications
- A JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California or New York preferred)
- Practical, creative problem-solving: the ability to apply legal requirements to fast-changing, deeply technical work, with an understanding that the goal is to enable responsible research and product development in a risk-calibrated environment
- Exceptional communication and analytical skills, technical fluency, and the ability to navigate ambiguous and uncharted legal territory, turning complex technical and legal analysis into advice people can act on
- Familiarity and comfort advising on the EU AI Act, U.S. legislation and AI frameworks, GDPR/CCPA, and comparable regimes globally, sometimes where no AI-specific legislation exists
- Interest in thinking deeply about the impact of AI on society and how to make humanity's transition to the AI age as beneficial as possible
- Sound judgment about when to be flexible and when to hold a line; comfort making high-stakes calls in unsettled areas and outside your core expertise; and a low-ego, collaborative approach, doing the work needed rather than delegating it or being territorial
Preferred qualifications
- At least 8 years of legal experience advising technology companies on copyright, privacy, data, AI regulation, and related product and policy issues, ideally including time in-house and work on AI/ML products or services
- Experience engaging directly with regulators or standards bodies
- Working technical literacy: enough familiarity with how models are trained, evaluated, and deployed to ask researchers and engineers the right questions and spot the legal issues in a technical design
- An academic or publishing background, or experience with copyright, open-source, and data licensing
- Experience with biosecurity, dual-use research, export controls, or safety frameworks such as Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy
- Experience advising on academic or industry research, including publications, external collaborations, data sharing, or human-subjects and consent questions, ideally in AI or an adjacent technical field
Role-specific policy: We prefer candidates who can work from our San Francisco or New York office at least 3 days a week, but may consider other locations for the right candidate.
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
Logistics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
How we're different
We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.
The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.
Come work with us!
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.