Policy Design Manager, Conventional Weapons

Location: Remote-friendly with required travel; staff are expected to work from an Anthropic office at least 25% of the time in San Francisco, New York City, or Washington, DC.

Annual salary: $245,000–$285,000 USD

Company

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

What you will do

• Own and maintain the policy defining which conventional-weapons-related activities Claude may support.
• Build threat models and evaluations covering weapons development, software, autonomy, and dual-use platforms.
• Partner with engineering to implement model guardrails, detection systems, and enforcement tooling.
• Handle escalations involving conventional-weapons content and respond to emerging risks.
• Communicate policy reasoning to product, engineering, legal, leadership, 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 policy judgments.
• Experience in a service research laboratory, defense research or innovation agency, or weapons-systems company.
• Ability to write operationally precise policy and explain complex technical topics clearly.
• Understanding of legal frameworks governing weapons and their transfer across jurisdictions.
• Ability to perform rigorous open-source technical analysis of weapons systems.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education, training, or experience in a relevant field.

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of machine learning and large language model fundamentals.
• Engineering experience in systems engineering, robotics and autonomy, guidance, navigation and control, sensors, aerospace, mechanical engineering, materials, energetics, or embedded software.
• Experience with ITAR, EAR, or international arms-control regimes.
• Experience evaluating classifiers, including LLM-based classifiers, and reasoning about precision and recall.
• Trust and safety or product policy experience at a technology platform.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work across research, engineering, policy, and business disciplines.
• Flexible working hours and a research environment focused on high-impact AI safety work.
• Competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Visa sponsorship may be available, with immigration-lawyer support, depending on the role and candidate.
• Regular research discussions and an office environment designed for collaboration.