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 Team
As part of Anthropic’s work on the frontier of cybersecurity, we are forming a new team focused on steering the world through the next generation of cybersecurity. It is now clear that frontier AI models – Mythos and beyond – will have dramatic impacts on cybersecurity. This team will research the impacts of advanced models, beyond Mythos, on security – and publish the research and build + deploy the defenses the world needs to navigate it smoothly. We believe many parts of cybersecurity will need to be fundamentally reimagined for the age of powerful models.
This team is incubated with the highest priority within the Frontier Red Team, which studies the catastrophic risks and builds and advocates for defenses. See our previous related work on Mythos, N-days, exploits, 0-day, and finding vulns in hardened codebase. We also run Project Glasswing.
About the Role
The Lead will oversee all of Anthropic’s mission-driven research on defending the world in an era of advanced cybersecurity capabilities. They will lead research to uncover the offensive and defensive capabilities of Claude, prototype defenses in the wild, inform how Claude is trained and safeguarded in order to favor defenders, and engage with the public and government. The Lead will, over the long run, focus on how to give defenders a permanent advantage. Done well, within a year we expect Mythos, Glasswing, and our vulnerability and exploit research to seem like a modest first step towards this vision. They will work with our Product, Training, Security, and Safeguards teams to support their missions.
The Lead will be responsible for all components of this vision. They will hire a world-class research team, lead them to produce frontier research on extremely quick timelines, maximize the public impact of that research, and build and deploy defenses into the world. The lead will develop a compelling vision for a dramatically more secure future, and communicate it to the company, industry, researchers, and government. The lead will also be responsible for informing and making difficult decisions at the highest levels of the company – how to broadly distribute access to advanced capabilities, how to safeguard the model, what threats to focus on, what systems to harden, and what high-risk, high-reward research to take bets on.
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The role is based in San Francisco, but we expect some travel at least to Washington DC.
What You'll Do
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Be responsible for Anthropic’s overall defensive cybersecurity vision
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Hire and lead a world-class research team of AGI-pilled cybersecurity researchers and program managers
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Design an AGI cybersecurity research program that aims to secure the world
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Lead the team to execute on this research at the scale, speed, and quality of a frontier lab
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Work with other Anthropic teams, such as Training, Safeguards, and Policy, to address their biggest opportunities and challenges in Anthropic’s cybersecurity mission
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Identify field partners – maintainers, researchers, companies, governments – to do joint projects with
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Develop a strategy to publish and share research with the world for maximum impact; shut down and avoid low-impact research or research communication
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Translate technical findings into compelling demonstrations and artifacts that inform policymakers and the public
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Proactively identify critical strategic decisions for the company and the AI lab ecosystem, raise them, marshall resources to address them, and help the decisions be made as smoothly as possible
Sample Projects
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Writing the strategy for how a frontier AI lab can use frontier models and resources to most defend the world
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Building frameworks and tools that enable AI models to autonomously find and patch vulnerabilities using tens of trillions of tokens
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Running purple-team simulations where AI defenders compete against AI attackers in network environments
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Pointing autonomous AI systems at real-world security challenges (bug bounties, CTFs etc.) to characterize risks, defensive potential, and compare to human experts
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Building demonstrations of frontier AI cyber capabilities for policy stakeholders
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.
Annual Salary:
$485,000—$690,000 USD
Logistics
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.
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 Probl
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