Policy Design Manager, Conventional Weapons

Anthropics 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.

Anthropics Safeguards organization builds the policies evaluations and enforcement systems that define and hold the limits on how Claude can be this role youll own our conventional weapons work.

Defining a crisp boundary between acceptable and harmful requests in this domain is difficult because the underlying components are dual-use: the same capabilities that serve civilian engineering and research can also contribute to a weapons system. Building the threat models evaluations and detection systems that hold that boundary is the core of this role.

Conventional weapons are increasingly defined by software and the risks reach well beyond firearms: from a model operating a weapons system or writing guidance code to the weaponization of dual-use platforms. The role spans every weapon class up to autonomous systems that select and engage targets without human authorization.

You will help define the line between prohibited weapons development and legitimate research and engineering work and how to operationalize the distinction. This will include translating technical judgment into principles that engineers can implement and enforcement teams can act on.

• Own and maintain Anthropics conventional weapons policy defining the boundary between the activities our models should and should not support

• Build the threat models and evaluations that measure how our models could contribute to weapons development including the software and autonomy components that define modern weapons systems and keep them current as the technology and its misuse evolve

• Partner with engineering to turn the policy into model guardrails detection systems and enforcement tooling

• Serve as the subject-matter expert for escalations involving conventional weapons content including rapid response to emerging risks

• Build shared understanding of the policy across product engineering legal and leadership communicating its reasoning to technical and non-technical audiences

• Engage external experts as well as government and industry partners and translate that engagement into stronger policy and enforcement

• Have deep applied expertise in weapons systems and can translate complex technical evidence into sound policy judgments

• Experience in a relevant setting such as a service research laboratory a defense research or innovation agency or a company that designs or builds weapons systems

• Can write clear operationally precise policy and explain complex technical topics to non-specialist audiences

• Understand the legal frameworks governing weapons and their transfer and can craft policy that holds up across jurisdictions

• Can do rigorous technical analysis of weapons systems using only open sources

• Are comfortable with ambiguity and drawn to problems that have no established playbook

• Are motivated by preventing misuse without obstructing the legitimate work in the field

• A working understanding of machine learning and large language model fundamentals

• Hands-on engineering experience in a weapons-relevant technical domain such as systems engineering robotics and autonomy guidance/navigation/control sensors and signal processing aerospace or mechanical engineering materials and energetics or embedded software

• Hands-on experience applying arms export controls (ITAR/EAR) or international arms-control regimes

• Experience building or evaluating classifiers including LLM-based ones and reasoning about precision and recall for rare high-consequence categories

• Trust & safety or product policy experience at a technology platform

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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 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 youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

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. Were 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.

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 aboutour policy for using AI in our application process.