Head of Policy Design, Societal Harms

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 detection and enforcement systems that define and hold the limits on how Claude can be this role youll lead our policy design team managing the teams responsible for radicalization child safety user well-being harmful manipulation and election integrity among other harm areas.

The team is responsible for understanding and defining the risks that come with engaging with Claude how those risks materialize in the real world and the mitigations needed to prevent them. As the manager youll work with your team to draw the boundaries between what is and is not allowed then partner with research product and engineering to build the right interventions. Mitigating these harms takes the whole stack: the values and judgment trained into the model itself the policies and detection systems we enforce on top of it and the interventions we build into our products. More capable models new product surfaces and new user behaviors will keep testing these boundaries so the teams policies have to keep pace.

Youll work closely with product to develop and iterate on the strategy and vision for how our safety layers fit together and with your team and cross-functional partners to decide which mitigations make the most sense and how to implement them. Youll also coordinate policy decisions across the portfolio: ensuring theyre made with the right stakeholders in the room tracked over time and applied consistently across harm areas and product surfaces.

This is a leadership role for someone who combines expertise in the harm areas themselves with fluency in how frontier models are actually developed and deployed and who does their best work across team boundaries. Youll spend as much time developing the leads who own each harm area as you will on the policy questions themselves.

*Important context for this role: some of the work involves exposure to explicit content including material of a sexual violent or psychologically disturbing nature.

• Lead develop and grow the managers and teams responsible for the consumer harms portfolio including child safety user well-being harmful manipulation and election integrity

• Coordinate policy decisions across the portfolio and build the mechanisms that keep them tracked consistent and legible so stakeholders know what was decided why and who owns what

• Set the strategy for how mitigations built on top of the model policies detection and enforcement systems and product interventions complement what is trained into the model itself partnering closely with the alignment training team that owns Claudes character

• Prioritize across harm areas competing for the same resources and make those tradeoffs and their rationale clear to leadership

• Serve as the escalation point for high-severity and ambiguous consumer harms decisions including rapid response to emerging risks

• Partner with engineering data science product legal and research across the model development cycle so consumer harms considerations are represented from training through launch on every surface where Claude is deployed

• Engage external experts civil society organizations and regulators and translate that engagement into stronger policy and enforcement

• Experience leading teams including managing managers or senior specialists in AI safety product policy or a related field

• Deep applied familiarity with consumer harm areas such as child safety mental health and well-being manipulation or election integrity and good judgment about how these harms differ in mechanism severity and mitigation

• A track record of exceptional cross-team collaboration: building durable working relationships with teams you dont control and getting to shared decisions where ownership is genuinely distributed

• Working understanding of how frontier models are developed and deployed the training and fine-tuning cycle evaluations and launch processes and how different model environments (consumer products APIs agentic tools) change both risk and the mitigations available

• Experience translating policy positions into mechanisms that can be enforced and measured and communicating the reasoning to technical and non-technical audiences including executives

• Sound judgment in ambiguous high-consequence decisions and comfort making a call and escalating appropriately on incomplete information

• Subject-matter depth in one or more of the portfolios harm areas from academia clinical practice civil society government or trust & safety work

• Experience working directly with model training or research teams on model behavior or shaping the character of a deployed AI system

• Experience with generative AI safety systems including LLM-based classification evaluation or enforcement pipelines

• Experience engaging external stakeholders in these domains child safety organizations election authorities mental health experts or regulators

• Experience using agentic AI tools to scale a teams analysis and operations

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.