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
We are looking for a Federal Affairs Director to lead and operationalize Anthropic's federal government relations program, winning on critical AI policy, legislation, and regulation that advances Anthropic's mission of ensuring that artificial intelligence systems are developed safely and benefit humanity.
As the leader of this function, you will work closely with Anthropic's Head of North America Government Relations and coordinate with the broader federal affairs team to translate strategic objectives into executable federal policy campaigns, architect coalitions to move policy outcomes, and manage sophisticated engagement across Congress, the White House, and federal agencies. You will be responsible for building and managing a federal affairs operation that can strategically navigate rapid technological change and the policy gaps it creates, identifying institutional leverage and political alignment opportunities, and moving key decision-makers through deep understanding of how incentives work in the federal system.
Successful candidates will demonstrate a track record of political strategy excellence and operational leadership—with specific examples of how you have broken down complex policy objectives into quarterly milestones and measurable leading indicators, managed multi-stakeholder campaigns under time pressure, won legislative and regulatory outcomes in contested environments, and built systems and processes that enable a team to execute with accountability and focus.
Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about safe development of AI systems, and build partnership with governments through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. We recognize that our approach to AI policy is genuinely distinctive in the marketplace—grounded in honest assessment of technological trajectories and authentic concern for safe scaling—and we need a federal affairs leader who understands how to operationalize that positioning creatively and strategically.
This role offers a rare opportunity to build and scale a federal affairs operation with high-impact capabilities that meet the current moment. You will be responsible for building the infrastructure, processes, and accountability mechanisms that enable our teams to effectively shape federal policymaking on critical issues like responsible AI scaling and governance.
In this role, you will:
Lead and operationalize Anthropic's federal affairs program, design the operational structure, strategic priorities, and decision-making processes that enable the team to execute and win on policy outcomes
Break down federal policy objectives into executable quarterly and annual milestones, establish leading indicators that track progress toward policy outcomes, and maintain accountability with senior leadership on strategy and results
Develop and execute sophisticated policy impact strategy across Congress, the White House, and federal agencies—identifying institutional leverage points, understanding incentive structures, and architecting coalition and alignment strategies that move decision-makers
Execute Anthropic's strategic political engagement program, including support for federal candidates whose positions align with responsible AI development and safety; build frameworks for evaluating political opportunities and managing comprehensive engagement across the full range of political impact mechanisms
Manage relationships with key federal stakeholders including elected officials and their senior staff, agency political and policy leadership, and external partners—with the primary objective of advancing Anthropic's policy priorities
Expand the federal affairs team, recruiting and developing strategists who can execute across multiple policy domains, manage complex stakeholder relationships, and drive accountability
Operationalize policy campaigns that translate Anthropic's technical research into politically viable, actionable policy proposals
Design cross-functional coordination processes with Anthropic's policy, communications, and executive teams to ensure federal affairs strategy is integrated with company-wide policy positioning and leverages our distinctive credibility
Build frameworks for gathering, synthesizing, and communicating federal policy intelligence to inform executive decision-making; develop regular reporting and strategy reviews that track progress against policy objectives
Work in close partnership with Anthropic leadership and coordinate with federal affairs managers across the team to operationalize the federal affairs agenda
You may be a good fit if you:
Align with our mission and embrace the imperative of policy impact and change
Have 15+ years of experience leading federal government affairs programs or political strategy in fast-paced environments, with demonstrated success winning on legislative and regulatory outcomes in contested policy areas
Have a track record of translating strategic objectives into executable plans with clear milestones and measurable outcomes; you think in terms of leading indicators and can articulate progress toward policy wins to senior leadership
Understand how Congress and the Administration works at a structural level—committee incentives, legislative and regulatory processes, leverage points, and how to move votes and shift institutional positions
Have experience in technology policy, emerging technology regulation, or policy areas affected by rapid innovation and technological change; you understand how to navigate the policy gaps that disruptive change creates
Can manage across multiple substantive policy domains without deep expertise in each area; you have intellectual curiosity and enough substantive ability to validate work, ask incisive questions, and guide strategy, but you are ultimately an operator and strategist, not a subject matter expert
Demonstrate sophisticated understanding of how to align incentives across stakeholders—identifying aligned constituencies, structuring coalitions, and creating conditions for policy movement that serves multiple stakeholder interests
Have proven ability to manage internal teams and complex multi-stakeholder campaigns under time pressure in high-stakes environments, with measurable accountability for outcomes
Thrive in translating complex technical topics into politically viable policy positions and messaging, often in environments where there is significant institutional resistance or uncertainty
Have experience working with communications teams to develop strategic messaging that creates political advantage in contested policy debates
Are drawn to working with an organization that approaches AI policy with intensity and intellectual honesty; you can operationalize and leverage that positioning as a competitive advantage
Are based in or willing to relocate to Washington DC
**Deadline to apply: **We will be accepting applications until November 16th, 2025 at 6pm PT.
The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.
Annual Salary:
$345,000—$460,000 USD
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.
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