Copyright 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 Anthropic's first dedicated Copyright Counsel, you will work cross-functionally with our AI research and product development teams and in-house legal team members. You will collaborate across research, product, and litigation to navigate emerging copyright challenges unique to frontier AI systems. You will tackle novel legal questions around AI training data, collaborate with research, product, and litigation teams, and help establish copyright frameworks that will shape the future of AI development. You will also represent Anthropic's views on copyright and AI through external engagement, via policy papers and in-person engagements. The ideal candidate will bring deep copyright expertise and a pioneering mindset to build this critical function from the ground up.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as the internal expert resource on copyright law for research, product, litigation, and policy stakeholders
• Advise in-house legal teams on a range of copyright issues across model and product development and litigation
• Monitor and translate US and international copyright developments to internal, research and product teams and legal/policy stakeholders
• Evolve and implement the global strategy on copyright issues, including monitoring, researching, and advising on emerging developments
• Shape public positions and create advocacy materials on copyright issues
• Collaborate with in-house legal team and outside counsel on litigation and monitor copyright developments involving other organizations
• Engage with academics, industry groups, and other stakeholders to develop norms and best practices around copyright and AI

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 10-15 years of legal experience advising on copyright issues for technology companies or AI/ML products (in-house experience preferred)
• Have deep expertise in U.S. copyright law and its application to emerging technologies, with working knowledge of international copyright frameworks (especially EU)
• Are a creative problem solver who excels at translating complex legal concepts for technical teams and can develop practical solutions in uncharted legal territory
• Have demonstrated experience advising in-house teams on machine learning development lifecycles and the unique copyright challenges they present
• Thrive in fast-paced environments, wearing multiple hats while balancing innovation with responsible risk management
• Possess exceptional communication skills with a track record of cross-functional collaboration, particularly with technical and policy stakeholders
• Are passionate about AI's potential while maintaining a realistic assessment of its risks, with a commitment to building ethical and trustworthy systems

Strong candidates may 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:$300,000—$375,000 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.