Frontier Counsel
Anthropic
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 a member of the Frontier Counsel function, you’ll work on the cutting edge of AI, serving as a trusted legal advisor to Anthropic’s Research organization and Compute team, providing strategic guidance on data acquisition, risk mitigation, rapidly evolving regulatory regimes, and a variety of other complex legal issues at the intersection of AI development and responsible innovation. You’ll be a subject matter expert on copyright, privacy, and related issues pertaining to data used to develop frontier AI models, while also counseling on compute infrastructure considerations including data localization and cross-border data flows. You may also support our Alignment, Frontier Red-Teaming, Policy, and Societal Impacts teams to ensure safe, responsible AI development. The ideal candidate will have experience navigating complex legal challenges globally in a fast-moving technical environment, as well as translating legal requirements into creative and practical solutions for pioneering AI research and development.
Responsibilities:
- Advise Research teams on permissible data usage and partner with them on data sourcing strategy, maintaining and evolving our data acquisition frameworks, and supporting Research and Data Operations requests
- Counsel the Compute team on relevant legal considerations including data localization requirements, cross-border data transfers, privacy implications, and copyright considerations for compute infrastructure, partnering with internal subject matter experts as needed
- Monitor regulatory developments related to AI training data and compute operations, adapting internal policies and practices proactively to ensure compliance across jurisdictions
- Translate data and model development implications between research teams and Legal & Policy stakeholders, serving as a bridge between technical and legal functions
- Engage with academics, industry groups, and other stakeholders to develop norms and best practices around data governance for AI development
- Support Anthropic’s Alignment and Frontier Red-Teaming teams to advance their research on AI safety and model vulnerabilities, including advising on vendor engagements, external collaborations, and data usage
You may be a good fit if you have:
- A JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred)
- At least 8 years of relevant legal experience, with meaningful experience advising on data localization and cross-border data transfer frameworks, copyright, privacy, data, and related issues for technology companies or AI/ML products (in-house experience preferred)
- A creative, practical problem solver attitude with a passion and capacity for translating and applying legal requirements to technical concepts related to model development. You understand the importance of enabling innovation while developing responsibly and mitigating risks
- Experience advising on legal issues for AI products or services and academic research, with knowledge of the machine learning development lifecycle
- Excellent written communication skills, with the ability to draft clear policies, whitepapers, and other content. You enjoy engaging with stakeholders to evangelize best practices
- An understanding of how to achieve the right balance between the organization’s mission and goals, knowing when to be flexible and when to draw a hard line
- An enjoyment of wearing many hats in a fast-growing startup environment and are comfortable operating outside your areas of expertise and in uncharted legal territory
- A “doer” mentality and are willing to roll up your sleeves to get things done. You’re a team player who doesn’t hesitate to jump in to solve difficult problems
- Exceptional communication and analytical skills, technical fluency, and ability to navigate ambiguous and uncharted legal territory
- A growth mindset and epistemic humility with a passion for AI's potential to positively impact the world and realistic assessment of its risks and limitations. Commitment to building trustworthy, ethical AI systems
Strong candidates may have:
- In-house or similar experience at a global law firm
- Experience counseling on compute infrastructure or cloud services legal issues
- Experience in a tech company or other fast-paced environment
Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco or New York 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 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.
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