Head of External Affairs

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 Head of External Affairs, you will operationalize and scale Anthropic's global external affairs strategy and execution, and build a policymaker coalition to further Anthropic’s mission of ensuring that artificial intelligence systems are developed safely and benefit humanity. As the operational leader of Anthropic's policy function, you will work closely with company leadership to define policy positions, implement policy campaigns, and influence critical AI legislation. 

Core to this role will be operational and managerial excellence - you will build the systems and processes to enable a global team that shapes domestic and international AI safety conversations. Beyond supporting strategic campaign development, you will serve as the organizational backbone that allows the Anthropic CEO, President, and Head of Policy to focus on external engagement and vision-setting while ensuring our operational excellence.

Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about safe development of AI systems, and build partnership with governments through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. This role offers a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of AI policy; you will play a central role building the infrastructure and processes that enable our teams to effectively engage with governments on bringing about a safe transition to an AGI future. 

Responsibilities:

• Create systems to implement and operationalize pioneering policy positions that will shape the future of AI development and governance, including critical areas like Responsible Scaling
• Design and manage processes for executing sophisticated engagement strategies with key policymakers, coalitions, and partners, in every region of the world where we do business
• Develop frameworks for gathering, synthesizing, and internally broadcasting strategic policy intelligence to inform executive decision-making
• Collaborate on a daily basis with Anthropic's executive leadership—including the CEO, President, and Head of Policy—to operationalize our global Policy agenda
• Recruit, manage, and develop a world-class team of senior strategists and managers
• Build cross-functional processes to coordinate policy, research, and product teams
• Create systems to track, measure, and optimize our external affairs impact

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 15+ years of experience building and leading strong Government or External Affairs teams, with coverage of state, federal, and international issues
• Have a track record of effective, information-rich advocacy with senior government regulatory authorities, in both domestic and international policy communities
• Thrive when engaging with governments, policymakers, and civil society to translate complex technical topics into accessible and relevant information
• Excel at translating high-level vision into executable operational plans
• Have demonstrated success in managing complex, cross-functional projects involving multiple senior stakeholders
• Are deeply curious about frontier technological research and are eager to work closely with technical colleagues to translate new discoveries into policy outcomes
• Are based in either Washington DC or the San Francisco Bay Area 
• Are comfortable occasionally traveling to important policy locations, such as Washington DC, London, Brussels, et cetera

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$370,000—$475,000 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.