External Affairs, US Federal

Anthropic

Anthropic

Washington, DC, USA
Posted on Feb 5, 2026

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

We are looking for a Federal Affairs professional to drive public policy outcomes that advance Anthropic's mission helping the world safely make the transition to powerful AI. This role will build advocacy campaigns and relationships with Members of the Congress, specifically focused on the Democratic party in the House of Representatives.

As a member of our Federal Affairs team, you will advise internal stakeholders, shape policy positions, develop advocacy strategies, and build and manage policymaker relationships to advance our policy goals. Successful candidates will demonstrate a track record of effective political strategy and execution, proven relationships—with specific examples of how you have built substantive relationships with senior policymakers, executed multi-dimensional policy campaigns, navigated challenging legislative battles, and delivered measurable outcomes in contested environments.

Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about the safe development of AI systems, and build partnerships with governments through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. We recognize that our approach to AI policy is genuinely distinctive—grounded in honest assessment of technological trajectories and authentic concern for safe scaling—and we need federal affairs professionals who understand how to operationalize that positioning creatively and strategically.

This role offers a rare opportunity to shape AI governance at a critical moment. Federal AI policy is being written right now, and this is the most consequential technology policy debate in a generation. The decisions made in the next 2-3 years will shape how AI develops globally. You will work alongside leadership who are deeply engaged on policy and serve as partners in this work.

In this role, you will:

  • Advise internal stakeholders to help inform and develop public policy positions that advance Anthropic's mission

  • Translate complex policy issues into effective advocacy strategies, executing campaigns across issue sets while managing diverse stakeholder groups and leveraging communications, third-party groups, political engagement, and internal and external resources

  • Build and maintain key relationships with Members of the Democratic party in the House of Representatives.

  • Identify targets, cement relationships, and align them to Anthropic's policy priorities through proactive, substantive engagement—leading with substance, not just relationships

  • Work in tandem with Federal Affairs partners to share information, align on strategy, and execute; support the integration of the federal affairs team with key internal stakeholders across policy, communications, legal, and executive functions

  • Maintain accountability in driving outcomes, working with leadership to align on key results and track execution against strategic objectives with measurable milestones

  • Synthesize complex political dynamics into clear strategic recommendations for leadership, managing up effectively and building confidence through transparency on progress and risk

You may be a good fit if you:

  • Align with our mission and embrace the imperative of policy impact and change

  • Have 10+ years of experience working on policy within government or as a policy advocate, thriving in dynamics environments with demonstrated success winning on legislative and regulatory outcomes in contested policy areas

  • Have strong, established relationships as well as proven track record in building relationships with key policymakers and officials within the House Democratic conference. Experience in the following areas preferred: Energy and Commerce; Financial Services, Ways and Means; or Education and Workforce

  • Have a track record of translating strategic objectives into executable plans with clear milestones and measurable outcomes; you think in terms of leading indicators and can articulate progress toward policy wins to senior leadership

  • Can manage across multiple substantive policy domains without deep expertise in each area; you have intellectual curiosity and enough substantive ability to validate work, ask incisive questions, inform strategy, and execute.

  • Have experience in technology policy, emerging technology regulation, or policy areas affected by rapid innovation and technological change; you understand how to navigate the policy gaps that disruptive change creates

  • Synthesize complex policy dynamics into clear strategic counsel for leadership and internal stakeholders, as well as manage internal stakeholders effectively, building trust, confidence, and partnership

  • Thrive in translating complex technical topics into politically viable policy positions and messaging, often in environments where there is significant institutional resistance or uncertainty

  • Are drawn to working with an organization that approaches AI policy with intensity and intellectual honesty; you can operationalize and leverage that positioning as a competitive advantage

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:
$265,000$265,000 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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In 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 you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process