Research Scientist at Anthropic's Frontier Red Team focusing on emerging societal risks from advanced AI systems. Design experiments, build evaluations, and develop defenses against risks from autonomous and integrated AI models.
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.
The Frontier Red Team (FRT) is a technical research team within Anthropic’s Policy organization. Our goal is to make the entire world safer in this era of advanced AI by understanding what these systems can do and building the defenses that matter.
In 2026, we're focused on researching and ensuring safety with self-improving, highly autonomous AI systems—especially ones with cyberphysical capabilities. See our previous related work on cyberdefense, robotics, and Project Vend. We'll also be collaborating closely with the Autonomy workstream to understand novel, societal-scale risks that arise when agents interface with the external world. This is early-stage, high-conviction research with the potential for outsized impact.
Note: We are exclusively hiring in SF. We support relocation, but all hires must relocate before starting.
This Research Scientist will focus on scoping, evaluating, red teaming, and defending against societal risks caused by advanced models that emerge over the next few years. Powerful AI models may have major implications for national security, running a business, power and privacy, infrastructure, social relationships, and more. They may come as a result of the increasing integration of powerful models in our economy and social sphere.
As an independent Research Scientist, you’ll build a research program to understand these Emerging Risks. You’ll build evals, run experiments, and look for real world signals to understand how these may come about. You’ll turn this into insights we can use to steer the development and use of the technology more positively. Compared to the team's other focuses, you will focus less on acute catastrophic risks and more on risks that emerge from increasing integration into our world.
Design and run research experiments to understand the emerging risks models may create
Produce internal & external artifacts (research, products, demos, dashboards, tools) that communicate the state of model capabilities
Shape product, safeguards, and training decisions based on what you find
Work closely with Societal Impacts (SI) and Safeguards teams
Build, run, and study an autonomous AI-powered business (e.g. Project Vend), then identify the growth of real autonomous businesses in the wild using Clio and other tools
Build a benchmark for a model’s national security capabilities
Red team unsafeguarded models’ abilities to be used for control
Identify indicators of models being used to scale movements that rely on social control
Are a fast experimentalist who ships research quickly
Have experience creating a research program from scratch
Are thoughtful about humanity’s adaptation to powerful AI systems in our economy and society
Can communicate thoughtfully in written + spoken form with a wide range of stakeholders
Can scope ambiguous research questions into tractable first projects
Building & maintaining large, foundational infrastructure
Building simple interfaces that allow non-technical collaborators to evaluate AI systems
Working with and prioritizing requests from a wide variety of stakeholders, including research and product teams
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.
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
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.
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.
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