Research Counsel

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 Counsel function, you’ll advise on data acquisition and risk mitigation and be a subject matter expert on copyright, privacy, and related issues pertaining to data used to develop frontier AI models. You'll also support our Frontier Red-Teaming, Policy and Societal Impacts teams to ensure safe, responsible AI development. The ideal candidate will have experience navigating complex legal challenges at the intersection of machine learning, data acquisition, and content usage in a fast-moving technical environment.

Responsibilities:

• Advise various research teams on permissible data usage and partner with them on our data sourcing strategy, monitoring regulatory developments related to AI training data and adapt internal policies and practices proactively
• Translate data needs between research teams and Legal & Policy stakeholders
• Engage with academics, industry groups, and other stakeholders to develop norms and best practices around data governance for AI development
• Support Anthropic’s Frontier Red-Teaming team to advance their research on AI safety and model vulnerabilities, including advising on vendor engagements, external collaborations, and data usage
• Counsel the Societal Impacts team to support our efforts to understand the impact of AI on society, including advising on data usage and sharing and publications

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have a JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred)
• Have 5-10 years of legal experience advising on copyright, privacy, data, and related issues for technology companies or AI/ML products (in-house experience preferred)
• Are a creative, practical problem solver with a passion and capacity for translating and applying legal requirements to technical concepts related to model development. You understand the importance of enabling innovation while developing responsibly and mitigating risks  
• Have experience advising on legal issues for AI products or services and academic research, and knowledge of the machine learning development lifecycle
• Have excellent written communication skills, with the ability to draft clear policies, whitepapers, and other content. You enjoy engaging with stakeholders to evangelize best practices
• You understand how to achieve the right balance between the organization’s mission and goals, when to be flexible and when to draw a hard line
• You enjoy wearing many hats in a fast-growing startup environment and are comfortable operating outside your areas of expertise and in uncharted legal territory
• You are a “doer” and are willing to roll up your sleeves to get things done. You’re a team player who doesn’t hesitate to jump in to solve difficult problems

Strong candidates may also have:

• In-house or similar experience at a global law firm 
• Experience in a tech company or other fast-paced environment

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$240,000—$300,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.

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.