Political Economist, Rule of Law

The posting, as Anthropic wrote it

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

Anthropic has done pioneering work examining the economic impacts of AI. The AI & Rule of Law team takes an analogous approach to a different question: how will AI affect our constitutional democratic institutions?

Increasingly powerful AI systems will put pressure on societal functions at every level — the courts, legislatures, electoral systems, oversight bodies, and the legal frameworks that hold democratic governance together. Our team exists to ask hard questions about those vulnerabilities, and to seek out strategies for protecting democratic freedoms — in the short and long term, through both technical and policy levers.

This is early, high-stakes research. The team is small, the problems are genuinely unsolved, and the work will matter.

We are looking for someone with deep expertise in both AI and at least one of: law, government, political science, or public policy. The ideal candidate understands the technical landscape well enough to reason about AI capabilities and risks, and understands democratic institutions well enough to see where those risks become structural threats.

Key responsibilities

Projects on this team are illustrative rather than fixed — we expect the research agenda to evolve as both AI capabilities and institutional pressures change. Current and expected focus areas include:

• Making fundamental contributions to the development and expansion of our public data and research on how people use AI for politics, including regular reports and deep dives on elections and policy topics, and grow into leading this work over time
• Designing and conduct empirical research on AI’s political effects, drawing on external data sources and the privacy-preserving measurement systems internally
• Designing, running, and analyzing experiments on systems of many AI agents, testing whether and when tools from political economy (rules, monitoring, voting, dispute resolution) help agents govern themselves and stay under human oversight
• Developing new methodological approaches for studying AI’s impact on:
• Developing measurement and causal-inference tooling to help Anthropic evaluate the downstream political consequences of its own training, product, and policy decisions
• Building and maintaining relationships with academic institutions, policy think tanks, and other research partners, and serve as the point of contact for outside researchers who use our data
• Working cross-functionally with other technical teams to improve our measurement infrastructure and data collection
• Translating research insights into actionable recommendations for model training, product deci

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n 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.