Research Scientist, Societal Impacts

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.

As a Societal Impacts research scientist on the Models Research Pod, you’ll close the loop between observing Claude’s behavior and improving it at the model level. You’ll use observational tools like Clio to analyze real-world usage patterns and build evaluations that assess whether Claude provides safe responses aligned with its Constitution.

Strong candidates will have experience with machine learning systems and a genuine interest in societal impacts research. You should be adaptable and excited to contribute to evolving team priorities rather than coming in with a fixed agenda. The role is highly cross‑functional, with regular collaboration across the fine‑tuning, safeguards, policy, and interpretability teams.

We’re hiring at both junior and senior levels. Senior researchers should be comfortable doing hands‑on technical work alongside helping set research direction.

• Using observational tools like Clio to analyze real‑world usage patterns and surface insights about how people interact with Claude.
• Building and running evaluations to assess Claude’s behavior across key dimensions of its Constitution, such as safety and quality of advice in high‑stakes situations.
• Partnering closely with fine‑tuning, safeguards, policy, and interpretability teams to translate research insights into model improvements.
• Generating insights about the societal impact of Anthropic’s systems and using this understanding to inform company strategy, research priorities, and policy positions.
• Sharing your work through research publications and external presentations, and developing tools and frameworks that make AI systems more understandable to policymakers, academics, and civil society.

• You have experience working with machine learning systems and are comfortable with technical infrastructure for interfacing with models.
• You have an interest in societal impacts research; prior experience in this area is a plus but not required.
• You’re adaptable and collaborative, able to take direction and contribute to team priorities rather than needing to pursue a predetermined research agenda.
• You’re skilled at writing up and communicating your results, even when they’re null or unexpected.
• You find it exciting to partner with colleagues across teams on large‑scale projects where the whole company contributes to building and analyzing AI systems.
• You have a background in machine learning, data science, or another technical field that involves generating insights from complex systems.
• You’re passionate about translating research insights into actionable recommendations for improving AI systems and informing policy.
• For senior candidates: you’re willing to do hands‑on work while also helping shape research direction, and you may be interested in management opportunities down the line.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

$350,000 - $850,000 USD

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. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to obtain 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 under‑represented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude…