Anthropic STEM Fellow - Remote US Contract Role

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 167,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic STEM Fellows Program is a four-month, US-only fixed-term contract running January 12 to May 8, 2027. Remote work within the United States is considered in certain circumstances, but all Fellows must attend a one-week in-person orientation in San Francisco.

Successful applicants will earn $100,000–$167,000 for the period, with potential for the equivalent annualized range of $300,000–$500,000. Applicants must hold US work authorization; visa sponsorship is not available; travel and

Qualifications

• Excited about the potential for AI to reason well about hard questions in their field where expert judgment matters.
• Hands-on experience using Claude and Claude Code in your day-to-day workflow.
• Hold a PhD in a STEM field and have several years of experience (e.g., post‑doc or faculty).
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, high-agency atmosphere for a few months and delivering concrete results.
• Existing authorization to work in the United States for the duration of the program.

Responsibilities

• Setting grand challenges for your field: identifying long-horizon open problems where Claude falls short of expert judgment, and defining what real progress on them looks like.
• Building comprehensive datasets, simulations, and rigorous, hard-to-game evaluations that test whether models can plan experiments, interpret data, reason about mechanisms, and systematically finding where they're confidently wrong.
• Applying Claude to open problems in your domain, using test‑time compute strategies and integrating the scientific tools and software your field relies on.

Skills

Claude experience

Scientific judgment

Adaptability

Education

PhD in STEM

Tools

Claude Code

Claude

Job description

Anthropic STEM Fellow - Remote US Contract Role — Remote

This fellowship is a US-only, fixed-term contract running January 12 to May 8, 2027. While remote work within the United States is considered in certain circumstances, all Fellows must attend a one-week in-person orientation in San Francisco — meaning a purely location-independent lifestyle is not fully supported here.

Key constraint for nomads: You must have existing US work authorization (visa sponsorship is not available). This immediately rules out most international nomads unless they already hold a US work visa (e.g., O-1, H-1B, TN, or are permanent residents/citizens). A standard tourist visa or ESTA will not satisfy the work authorization requirement.

If you do qualify, the compensation is exceptional: $100,000–$167,000 for just four months. Even in expensive nomad hubs, this affords significant financial flexibility:

• Lisbon: A comfortable monthly budget runs ~$2,500–$3,500; your fellowship earnings far exceed typical living costs.
• Bangkok: Monthly costs of ~$1,500–$2,500 make this very affordable on this salary.
• Medellín: Around $1,200–$2,000/month — extremely comfortable on this income.

Unfortunately, you'd need to be in the US for the duration. The silver lining: with remote-within-US flexibility possible, you could potentially base yourself in a lower-cost US city outside San Francisco after the orientation week. No travel perks or coworking stipends are explicitly mentioned for the Fellows Program.

About Anthropic

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.

Program Overview

Some of our world's grand challenges — from resolving long-open problems in mathematics to designing medicines for neglected diseases — require deep expert judgment that today's AI still lacks. We're working toward an AI scientist: a system capable of the long-horizon reasoning and experimental judgment needed to push the frontier on problems like these. We believe frontier AI, developed safely, can meaningfully accelerate progress across science and engineering. Getting there requires close collaboration with people who have spent years at the frontier of their fields.

The Anthropic STEM Fellows Program brings researchers and experts from across science and engineering into Anthropic for four months to take on the grand challenges of their fields with Claude. Working in small pods of Fellows from related fields, you will pair deep domain expertise with our frontier models and internal tooling to define the hardest open problems in your discipline, build the datasets and simulations that let us test and train Claude on them, and find exactly where it falls short.

We're looking for Fellows across science and engineering. Prior machine learning experience is helpful but not required. Scientific judgment and a willingness to learn quickly matter more.

Our first cohort of more than 20 STEM Fellows across mathematics, physics, the life sciences, and engineering ran from June to September 2026. The problems they built now feed Claude's training and one of our internal science evaluations.

What to Expect:

• A place in a small pod of Fellows working on related problems in your domain. Your pod meets weekly with Anthropic researchers to share methods, pressure-test ideas, and build on each other's work.
• A grand challenge at the frontier of your field: an ambitious, open-ended problem scoped with our research team so you can make real progress in four months.
• Access to frontier Claude models and internal evaluation tooling.

Compensation:

$100,000–$167,000 USD for the four-month fellowship (equivalent to $300,000–$500,000 USD annualized), and other benefits.

Key Responsibilities

• Setting grand challenges for your field: identifying long-horizon open problems where Claude falls short of expert judgment, and defining what real progress on them looks like.
• Building comprehensive datasets, simulations, and rigorous, hard-to-game evaluations that test whether models can plan experiments, interpret data, reason about mechanisms, and systematically finding where they're confidently wrong.
• Applying Claude to open problems in your domain, using test‑time compute strategies and integrating the scientific tools and software your field relies on.

Minimum Qualifications

• Excited about the potential for AI to reason well about hard questions in their field where expert judgment matters.
• Hands‑on experience using Claude and Claude Code in your day‑to‑day workflow.
• Hold a PhD in a STEM field and have several years of experience (e.g., post‑doc or faculty).
• Comfortable working in a fast‑paced, high‑agency atmosphere for a few months and delivering concrete results.
• Existing authorization to work in the United States for the duration of the program.

Logistics – Fellows

• The program runs from January 12th to May 8th, 2027, and is full‑time for the duration; some fellowships may be considered for an extension.
• Applications are open until October 28, 2026, and offers are planned by November 20th. Later stages will typically include a take‑home exercise and conversations with our research team about your research interests and possible project directions.
• All Fellows must attend a one‑week in‑person orientation in San Francisco.
• The default location is San Francisco. Remote engagements within the United States will be considered in certain circumstances.
• We are not currently able to sponsor visas for Fellows. To participate, you need to have or independently obtain full‑time work authorization in the United States.
• This is a fixed‑term contract position. Fellows are engaged through an employer of record, rather than employed directly by Anthropic.

Note: The policies below apply to Anthropic's full-time roles and do NOT apply to the Fellows Program.

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. 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, with 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 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.

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.

Is the Anthropic STEM Fellowship fully remote? The default location is San Francisco, and all Fellows must attend a one‑week in‑person orientation there. Remote engagements within the United States may be considered in certain circumstances, but purely remote or international participation is not available. How much does the Anthropic STEM Fellowship pay? Fellows receive $100,000–$167,000 USD for the four-month program, which is equivalent to $300,000–$500,000 USD annualized. Additional benefits are also provided. Do I need prior machine learning experience to apply? No — prior ML experience is helpful but not required. Anthropic values scientific judgment and domain expertise above all, along with a willingness to learn quickly. Can Anthropic sponsor a visa for the Fellows Program? No. Anthropic is not able to sponsor visas for the Fellows Program. Applicants must have existing US work authorization for the full duration of the program (January 12 to May 8, 2027). What is the application deadline and process? Applications are open until October 28, 2026, with offers planned by November 20th. The process typically includes a take‑home exercise and conversations with the Anthropic research team about your research interests and possible project directions.

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