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
As a societal impacts research scientist at Anthropic, you'll join a team conducting empirical research on AI's effects across society. You'll help develop and apply novel measurement systems to understand AI's real-world impact, while working to ensure these powerful technologies benefit humanity.
Our team combines rigorous empirical methods with creative technical approaches. We’re currently grappling with big questions in three key areas on how AI might impact: the economy, peoples’ wellbeing, and education. Additionally, we are continuously studying socio-technical alignment (what values do our systems have?), and evaluating novel AI capabilities as they arise. We develop privacy-preserving tools to measure AI's effects at scale, conduct mixed-methods studies of human-AI interaction, and translate research insights into actionable recommendations for both product and policy.
Note: We are only open to hiring in San Francisco for this team.
Responsibilities
- Design and conduct empirical studies to understand AI's societal effects, ranging from large-scale quantitative analyses using privacy-preserving measurement systems (like Clio) to qualitative investigations of human-AI interaction
- Develop novel methodological approaches for studying AI systems' real-world impacts, including creating new evaluation frameworks, measurement tools, and analysis techniques
- Lead research projects across our key focus areas:
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate research insights into concrete product improvements and policy campaigns
- Communicate findings through research publications, policy briefs, and presentations to diverse stakeholders
- Contribute to the development of measurement infrastructure and evaluation frameworks that enable systematic study of AI's societal effects
You May Be a Good Fit If You Have
- Experience conducting empirical research on socio-technical systems, particularly studies that combine quantitative and qualitative methods
- Strong technical skills, including:
- A desire to do whatever it takes to get the research done, including writing code, debugging code, and pair programming with others
- Track record of leading research projects from conception to publication, including:
- A desire to go above and beyond publications in order to translate research into real world impact
- Expertise in one or more of our focus areas (economics, health/wellbeing, education, alignment, evaluation methods)
- Comfort working with AI systems and ability to think critically about their capabilities and limitations
- Strong interest in ensuring AI development benefits humanity
- Ability to collaborate effectively with teams across technical research, policy, and product development
Some Examples of Our Recent Work
- Which Economic Tasks are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations
- Clio: Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use
- Measuring the Persuasiveness of Language Models
- Evaluating feature steering: A case study in mitigating social biases
- Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning Language Models with Public Input
- GlobalOpinionQA: Measuring Representation of Global Values in Language Models
- Discrimination in Language Model Decisions: Evaluation and Mitigation
- Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned
Additional Information
For this role, we're open to candidates interested in either a 6-month research residency or a full-time position. The residency track includes the expectation of conversion to full-time for successful residents.
Deadline to apply: None. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
The expected salary range for this position is:
Annual Salary:
$280,000—$425,000 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.