Policy Design Manager, Conventional Weapons

Location: San Francisco, CA; New York City, NY; or Washington, DC. Hybrid work is required, with staff expected to be in an office at least 25% of the time.

Annual salary: $245,000–$285,000 USD

Company

Anthropic develops reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems designed to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Own and maintain the policy defining which conventional weapons activities Claude should and should not support.
• Build threat models and evaluations covering weapons development, software, autonomy, and potential misuse of dual-use technologies.
• Partner with engineering to translate policy into model guardrails, detection systems, and enforcement tools.
• Serve as the subject-matter expert for escalations involving conventional weapons content and emerging risks.
• Communicate policy reasoning to product, engineering, legal, leadership, and other technical and non-technical audiences.
• Engage external experts, government, and industry partners to strengthen policy and enforcement.

Requirements

• Deep, applied expertise in weapons systems and the ability to translate technical evidence into sound policy judgments.
• Experience in a service research laboratory, defense research or innovation agency, or weapons-systems company.
• Ability to write clear, operationally precise policy and explain complex technical topics to non-specialists.
• Understanding of legal frameworks governing weapons and their transfer across jurisdictions.
• Ability to conduct rigorous open-source technical analysis of weapons systems.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education, training, and experience in a relevant field.

Nice to have

• Understanding of machine learning and large language model fundamentals.
• Engineering experience in systems engineering, robotics and autonomy, guidance, navigation and control, sensors, signal processing, aerospace, mechanical engineering, materials, energetics, or embedded software.
• Experience with ITAR, EAR, international arms-control regimes, classifiers, LLM-based evaluations, trust and safety, or product policy.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work across research, engineering, policy, and business functions.
• Focus on large-scale research efforts and empirical, high-impact AI safety work.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment designed for collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Visa sponsorship is available for eligible roles and candidates, with immigration-lawyer support.