Anthropic Fellows Program

Heelsandtech; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 155,905 - 194,444; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Weekly stipend

Funding for research expenses

Mentorship from AI experts

Job summary

Heelsandtech is launching its Anthropic Fellows Program, which offers a unique opportunity for individuals to engage in full-time research in AI safety. Selected fellows will receive a weekly stipend of 3,850 USD for a duration of 4 months, with dedicated mentorship from AI experts.

The program emphasizes collaboration, empirical research projects, and the potential for full-time offers upon successful completion. Candidates should be fluent in Python and ready to contribute to impactful AI research.

Qualifications

• Motivated to ensure AI is safe and beneficial for society.
• Excited to transition into empirical AI research.
• Thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments.

Responsibilities

• Engage in 4 months of full-time research.
• Participate in project selection and mentor matching.
• Collaborate with researchers and broaden the AI safety community.

Skills

Fluent in Python programming

Strong technical background in computer science, mathematics, or physics

Experience in areas of research or engineering related

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.

Apply using this link We are accepting applications on a rolling basis for the next cohort of Anthropic Fellows, which is expected to start in late September. In some circumstances, we can accommodate fellows starting outside the usual cohort timelines — please note in your application if the September start date doesn’t work for you.

Anthropic Fellows Program overview

The Anthropic Fellows Program is designed to foster AI research and engineering talent. We provide funding and mentorship to promising technical talent – regardless of previous experience.

Fellows will primarily use external infrastructure (e.g. open-source models, public APIs) to work on an empirical project aligned with our research priorities, with the goal of producing a public output (e.g. a paper submission). In one of our earlier cohorts, over 80% of fellows produced papers.

We run multiple cohorts of Fellows each year and review applications on a rolling basis. This application is for cohorts starting in July 2026 and beyond.

What to expect

• 4 months of full‑time research
• Direct mentorship from Anthropic researchers
• Access to a shared workspace (in either Berkeley, California or London, UK)
• Connection to the broader AI safety and security research community
• Weekly stipend of 3,850 USD / 2,310 GBP / 4,300 CAD + benefits (these vary by country)
• Funding for compute (~$15k/month) and other research expenses

The interview process will include an initial application & reference check, technical assessments & interviews, and a research discussion.

Compensation

The expected base stipend for this role is 3,850 USD / 2,310 GBP / 4,300 CAD per week, with an expectation of 40 hours per week for 4 months (with possible extension).

Fellows workstreams

Due to the success of the Anthropic Fellows for AI Safety Research program, we are now expanding it across teams at Anthropic. We expect there to be significant overlap in the types of skills and responsibilities across the roles and will by default consider candidates for all the workstreams.

Some of the workstreams may include unique assessment steps; we therefore ask you for workstream preferences in the application. You can see an overview of the current workstreams below:

• AI Safety Fellows
• AI Security Fellows
• ML Systems & Performance Fellows
• Economics Fellows

Across the workstreams, you may be a good fit if you:

• Are motivated by making sure AI is safe and beneficial for society as a whole
• Are excited to transition into empirical AI research and would be interested in a full‑time role at Anthropic
• Have a strong technical background in computer science, mathematics, or physics
• Thrive in fast‑paced, collaborative environments
• Can implement ideas quickly and communicate clearly

Strong candidates may also have:

• Strong background in a discipline relevant to a specific Fellows workstream (e.g. economics, social sciences, or cybersecurity)
• Experience in areas of research or engineering related to their workstream

Candidates must be:

• Fluent in Python programming
• Available to work full‑time on the Fellows program

AI Safety Fellows

Fellows will undergo a project selection & mentor matching process. Potential mentors include: Sam Bowman, Alex Tamkin, Trenton Bricken, Samuel Marks, Kyle Fish, Ethan Perez.

Potential research areas include:

• Scalable Oversight
• Adversarial Robustness and AI Control
• Model Organisms
• Model Internals / Mechanistic Interpretability
• AI Welfare
• Open‑source circuits

You might be a particularly great fit for this workstream if you:

• Are motivated by reducing catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems
• Have experience with empirical ML research projects
• Have experience working with large language models
• Have experience in one of the research areas mentioned above
• Have a track record of open‑source contributions

AI Security Fellows

Potential mentors include: (none specified previously; list omitted for brevity.)

You might be a particularly great fit for this workstream if you:

• Are motivated by reducing catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems
• Have contributed to open‑source projects in LLM‑ or security‑adjacent repositories
• Have demonstrated success in bringing clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems
• Have experience with pentesting, vulnerability research, or other offensive security work
• Have a demonstrated willingness to do the “dirty work” that produces high‑quality outputs
• Have reported CVEs or been awarded bug bounties
• Have experience with empirical ML research projects
• Have experience with deep learning frameworks and experiment management

ML Systems & Performance Fellows

Potential mentors include: Sunny Duan, Will Williams.

Projects may include:

• Building a CPU simulator for accelerator workloads
• Adding backends for different accelerators on an open source project
• Building on‑demand infrastructure for other infrastructure heavy fellow projects
• Building complex synthetic data or environment pipelines
• Studying and improving model training processes

You might be a particularly great fit for this workstream if you:

• Have strong software engineering skills with experience building complex ML systems
• Can balance research exploration with engineering rigor and operational reliability
• Enjoy collaborating across research and engineering disciplines
• Are comfortable working with large‑scale distributed systems and high‑performance computing
• Have experience with training, fine‑tuning, or evaluating large language models
• Are adept at analyzing and debugging model training processes

Anthropic Institute Fellows (Economics & Policy)

Potential mentors and research areas include: (none specified; omitted for brevity.)

Projects may include:

• Designing and conducting empirical research on AI’s economic effects
• Developing new methodological approaches for studying AI’s impact on labor markets, the future of work, and society
• Analyzing the offense–defense balance for AI‑enabled cyber and bio capabilities as models scale
• Measuring the extent to which model performance increases with custom harnesses
• Identifying market‑driven mechanisms that could improve societal resilience to anticipated threats from AI systems
• Identifying metrics relating to AI R&D that could serve as early warning signals for recursive self‑improvement

You might be a particularly great fit for this workstream if you:

• Have an interest in economics or policy research; prior experience in this area is a plus but not required
• Are adaptable and collaborative, able to take direction and contribute to team priorities rather than needing to pursue a predetermined research agenda
• Are skilled at writing up and communicating your results, even when they’re null or unexpected
• Are passionate about translating research insights into actionable recommendations for improving AI systems and informing policy

Logistics

To participate in the Fellows program, you must have work authorization in the US, UK, or Canada and be located in that country during the program.

Workspace locations: We have designated shared workspaces in London and Berkeley where fellows will work from and mentors will visit. We are also open to remote fellows in the UK, US, or Canada. We will ask you about your availability to work from Berkeley or London (full‑or part‑time) during the program.

Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for fellows. To participate in the Fellows program, you need to have or independently obtain full‑time work authorization in the UK, the US, or Canada.

Program duration: The program runs for 4 months, full‑time. If you can’t commit to the full duration, please still apply and note your constraints in the application. We review these requests on a case‑by‑case basis.

Please note: We do not guarantee that we will make any full‑time offers to fellows. However, strong performance during the program may indicate that a Fellow would be a good fit for full‑time roles at Anthropic. In previous cohorts, 25‑50% of fellows received a full‑time offer, and we’ve supported many more to go on to do great work on AI safety and security at other organizations.

Program is managed by Constellation, our recruiting partner. Updates will come from a Constellation address. Constellation also runs the Berkeley workspace and provides program support for fellows working on AI safety and security; fellows on capabilities‑focused projects are supported directly by Anthropic. All applicants currently use the same application portal but we are working to separate applications for safety/security and capabilities focused projects in future rounds.