Conceptual Reasoning Fellow

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 300,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is offering a four-month fellowship bringing researchers from philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy, and law to work with our research teams in San Francisco. Fellows pair domain expertise with Claude's capabilities to evaluate and apply AI safety improvements.

Compensation is $100,000–$167,000 for the four-month period (annualized $300,000–$500,000) plus benefits; remote engagements within the US may be considered and a one-week in-person orientation in San Francisco is

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience using Claude and Claude Code in day-to-day workflow.
• Hold (or are completing) a PhD in philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy or law, or equivalent research experience.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, high-agency atmosphere for a few months and deliver concrete results.

Responsibilities

• Identify key open problems in your field and use Claude to make progress.
• Assess societal challenges where your expertise is crucial and evaluate Claude’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Design evaluations and RL environments that test models in your field.
• Collaborate with Fellows to build environments that push Claude on hard problems.

Skills

Claude & Claude Code experience

AI reasoning enthusiasm

Fast-paced environment adaptability

Education

PhD in philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy or law

Job description

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

Many of the questions that will shape our future have no single checkable answer. Reasoning well about them, whether in law, policy, philosophy, economics, cognitive science, or AI safety itself, takes the kind of judgment experts spend years building. We believe frontier AI, developed safely, can become a real partner on these questions, but getting there means working closely with the people who know these fields best.

This fellowship brings researchers and experts from philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy, and law into Anthropic for four months to work alongside our research teams. Fellows pair deep domain expertise with our frontier models and internal tooling to evaluate, improve, and apply Claude's capabilities in their field.

What to Expect:

• A concrete, scoped project matched to your background, with mentorship from Anthropic researchers.
• Access to frontier Claude models and internal evaluation tooling.
• A cohort of incoming Fellows to collaborate with and a connection to Anthropic's broader research community.

Compensation

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

Key responsibilities

• Identifying key open problems in your field, assessing approaches to solving them, and using Claude to make progress on them.
• Identifying grand societal challenges which the expertise of your field is crucial for addressing, and assessing Claude’s strengths and weaknesses in tackling them.
• Designing evaluations and RL environments that test models in your field systematically, turning your expertise into working tests of how well Claude reasons in your field.
• Team up with other Fellows in your field to build environments that push Claude on the hardest, most judgment-heavy problems your discipline has to offer.

Minimum qualifications

• Are 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 (or are completing) a PhD in philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy or law, or have equivalent research experience.
• Are 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.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience designing evaluations, benchmarks, datasets, or expert rubrics.
• Demonstrated expertise in your field, shown through research, scholarship, or expert‑level analytical writing.

Representative projects

• A philosopher building hard cases that require normative judgment in ethics or formal epistemology.
• A cognitive scientist designing experimental‑design and model‑comparison tasks.
• An economist writing modelling and identification problems with ground truth.
• A policy scholar drafting regulatory and cost‑benefit analysis tasks with expert rubrics.
• A legal scholar building AI‑policy‑relevant law datasets.

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 we plan to make offers by November 20th. Later stages will typically include a take‑home exercise and conversations with our research team and potential mentors about your research interests and possible project directions.
• We ask that all Fellows attend a one‑week in‑person orientation in San Francisco.
• The default location is in San Francisco. We will consider remote engagements within the United States in certain circumstances.
• 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 United States.
• This is a fixed‑term contract position. Fellows are engaged through an employer of record, rather than employed directly by Anthropic.

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 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.