Research Counsel

About the role

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.

What you’ll do

• Advise research and data teams on data sourcing, licensing, partnerships, and use, and help shape Anthropic's data acquisition and use strategy as laws and markets evolve
• Help coordinate regulatory readiness and model launches, review model documentation and system cards, respond to regulatory inquiries, and advise on legal questions for pre-release and internal models
• Support the Responsible Scaling Policy as applied to biological and chemical risk, including capability evaluations, tiered access for biosecurity researchers, and dual-use research questions
• Counsel the Societal Impacts, Economic, Alignment, Interpretability, Model Welfare, and Beneficial Deployments teams on research design, data collection and sharing, external collaborations, program launches, and publication review
• Monitor global AI, privacy, copyright, and export-control developments and translate them into practical internal guidance and policy, working closely with Product, Policy, and other legal stakeholders
• Engage with academics, regulators, industry groups, and civil society to help develop norms and best practices for responsible AI development and data governance

What they’re looking for

Select a requirement to inspect fit, evidence or application context.

• A JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California or New York preferred)
• Practical, creative problem-solving: the ability to apply legal requirements to fast-changing, deeply technical work, with an understanding that the goal is to enable responsible research and product development in a risk-calibrated environment
• Exceptional communication and analytical skills, technical fluency, and the ability to navigate ambiguous and uncharted legal territory, turning complex technical and legal analysis into advice people can act on
• Familiarity and comfort advising on the EU AI Act, U.S. legislation and AI frameworks, GDPR/CCPA, and comparable regimes globally, sometimes where no AI-specific legislation exists
• Interest in thinking deeply about the impact of AI on society and how to make humanity's transition to the AI age as beneficial as possible
• Sound judgment about when to be flexible and when to hold a line; comfort making high-stakes calls in unsettled areas and outside your core expertise; and a low-ego, collaborative approach, doing the work needed rather than delegating it or being territorial
• A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Helpful, not always essential

• At least 8 years of legal experience advising technology companies on copyright, privacy, data, AI regulation, and related product and policy issues, ideally including time in-house and work on AI/ML products or services
• Experience engaging directly with regulators or standards bodies
• Working technical literacy: enough familiarity with how models are trained, evaluated, and deployed to ask researchers and engineers the right questions and spot the legal issues in a technical design
• An academic or publishing background, or experience with copyright, open-source, and data licensing
• Experience with biosecurity, dual-use research, export controls, or safety frameworks such as Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy
• Experience advising on academic or industry research, including publications, external collaborations, data sharing, or human-subjects and consent questions, ideally in AI or an adjacent technical field