National Security Lead, Europe

anthropic; City Of London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A cutting-edge AI company in London seeks a National Security Lead. You will engage with European national security partners, shape policy and partnerships, and support public sector deployments. Ideal candidates will have over 10 years of experience in national security and strong communication skills. This role requires strategic thinking and technical knowledge, particularly in AI. Competitive compensation and flexible working arrangements are offered.

Benefits

Competitive compensation

Flexible working hours

Generous vacation and parental leave

Equity donation matching

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience working in national security agencies or related fields.
• Ability to develop and execute strategy independently across functions.
• Demonstrated interest in complicated technical subjects.

Responsibilities

• Lead policy engagement with European national security partners.
• Engage key NatSec policy stakeholders via briefings and consultations.
• Support public-private research collaborations.

Skills

National security experience

Strong communication skills

Strategic thinking

Technical understanding (AI, quantum computing, etc.)

Legal training in contract negotiations

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Job description

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

Anthropic’s mission is to ensure the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI. As part of this mission, we have advocated that democracies should continue to lead the development and deployment of powerful and trusted frontier AI, particularly for national security. We work closely with relevant national security communities to deliver this ambition.

We are looking for a National Security Lead to guide our strategic engagements with European national security and intelligence communities. Working closely with the national security team based in the US and the EMEA policy team, this senior role will help to shape Anthropic's approach to national security policy and partnerships in Europe during a critical period in AI development and governance. You will be the day to day point of contact with European national security partners, both ensuring that Anthropic’s leadership understands their priorities, and translating technology and policy developments within Anthropic for national security partners. You will also work closely with our EMEA public sector sales team to support public sector deployment of Claude in high‑leverage use cases that strengthen national security, enhance government efficiency, and accelerate allied competitiveness. This role is based in London.

In this role you will:

• Lead policy engagement with European national security partners on issues related to government use and national security implications of frontier models
• Engage key NatSec policy stakeholders (e.g., via briefings, consultations, demos, roundtables), in coordination with the wider national security and EMEA policy teams
• Partner with the EMEA public sector sales team to support commercial efforts involving government agency deployments
• Support and promote public‑private research collaborations
• Build a coalition of government agencies, nonprofits, safety institutes, and academics to in Europe to share knowledge around national security issues
• Collaborate with technical teams to translate Anthropic threat model research into concrete policy proposals, stakeholder education, and thought leadership opportunities

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience working in national security agencies, or a combination of government and related private sector experience
• Are high‑agency, able to develop and execute strategy independently, taking account of dependencies with other cross‑functional teams within Anthropic (including but not limited to policy, go‑to‑market, trust and safety, legal, product, research, comms, and marketing)
• Possess strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly when briefing policymakers and government officials
• Have demonstrated interest and experience in a complicated technical subject (ideally, AI, but other examples could be quantum computing, cryptography, fusion power, etc.)
• Have had some legal training in or exposure to contract negotiations
• Are willing/able to participate in a process to obtain/retain Developed Vetting clearance in the UK

This role is based in London. This job will also require travel in Europe and to the United States.

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.

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 sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to sponsor 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 it does 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.