Research Scientist Frontier Red Team CBRN Biosecurity
Research Scientist Frontier Red Team CBRN Biosecurity
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$ 280000 - 425000
1 Vacancy
Job Description
About Anthropic
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.
Were building a team that will research and mitigate extreme risks from future models.
This team will intensively redteam models to test the most significant risks they might be capable of in areas such as biosecurity cybersecurity risks or autonomy. We believe that clear demonstrations can significantly advance technical research and mitigations as well as identify effective policy interventions to promote and incentivize safety.
As part of this team you will lead research to baseline current models and test whether future frontier capabilities could cause significant harm. Daytoday you may decide you need to finetune a model to see whether it becomes superhuman in an eval youve designed; whiteboard a threat model with a national security expert; test a new training procedure or how a model uses a tool; or brief government labs and other research teams. Our goal is to see the frontier before we get there.
Our CBRN workstream is hiring for a Research Scientist with an emphasis on biosecurity risks (as outlined in our Responsible Scaling Policy. By nature this team will be an unusual combination of backgrounds. We are particularly looking for people with experience in these domains:
- Biosecurity: Youre a biologist whos concerned about the implications of AI development. Youre an academic who researches biosecurity defense. You have experience modeling biological phenomena or developing advanced threat modeling simulations.
- Science: Youre an ML researcher who builds agents to augment chemistry or biology research. Youve built a protein language model and you enjoyed looking through the embedding space. Youre a team lead at an MLfordrug discovery company. Youve built software for astronauts or materials scientists.
- Evaluations: Youve managed a largescale benchmark development project in AI or other domains. You have ideas about how AI and ML evaluations can be better.
Do not rule yourself out if you do not fit one of those categories its plausible the people were looking for do not fit any of the above! If you think about the most significant upsides and downsides of AI and you can do good research to get glimpses of what those look like please consider applying.
Please note: We will only be considering candidates who can be based in the Bay Area for this role. We have a strong preference for candidates who can start ASAP and ideally by May 2025.
Responsibilities
- Independently lead research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives
- Design run and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models
- Synthesize biosecurity research to establish thresholds of concern for AI capabilities
- Work with external partners to develop novel evaluations to accurately assess the biosecurity implications of our models
- Partner closely with researchers data scientists policy experts and other crossfunctional partners to advance Anthropics safety mission
- Communicate our findings to external stakeholders such as policymakers
You may be a good fit if you
- Have one of:
- An advanced degree (MS or PhD) in the biological sciences (Molecular Biology Computational Biology Bioengineering)
- Significant professional experience in biology research (including wetlab)
- Take pride in writing clean welldocumented code in Python that others can build upon
- Have a track record of using technical infrastructure to interface effectively with machine learning models
- Have familiarity with prompting and engineering large language models
- Are able to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints
- Have strong problemsolving skills and a resultsoriented mindset
- Have excellent communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment
- Pick up slack even if it goes outside your job description
- Prefer fastmoving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts
- Care about the societal impacts of AI
Strong candidates may also have experience with
- Wet lab experience in molecular biology
- Leading large projects with multiple external collaborators or stakeholders
- Developing evaluations or benchmarks for large language models
- Emerging technology policy including in biosecurity or AI
Representative projects
- Design and implement a new evaluation to test models for CBRN risks
- Develop a detailed threat model of CBRN risks and identify how core bottlenecks can be resolved from further evaluations
- Prepare briefing materials to share the results of an evaluation run with external research groups
The expected salary range for this position is:
Annual Salary:
$280000 $425000 USD
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelors degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
Locationbased 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.
How were different
We believe that the highestimpact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few largescale research efforts. And we value impact advancing our longterm 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 highestimpact 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: GPT3 CircuitBased 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.
Employment Type
Full Time
