Research Scientist, Frontier Red Team (CBRN, Biosecurity)

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a Research Scientist focused on biosecurity risks to lead critical research initiatives. This role involves collaborating with a diverse team to assess and mitigate risks posed by AI models, particularly in the context of biosecurity. You'll design and conduct experiments, synthesize research, and communicate findings to external stakeholders. If you're passionate about the societal impacts of AI and possess a strong background in biological sciences or related fields, this opportunity offers a dynamic environment where your contributions can shape the future of AI safety. Join us in our mission to understand and address the potential risks of advanced AI technologies.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in biological sciences or significant biology research experience.
• Proficient in Python and able to document code for collaborative use.

Responsibilities

• Lead research projects and collaborate on larger initiatives.
• Design and analyze experiments to understand large language models.
• Communicate findings to policymakers and external stakeholders.

Skills

Biosecurity Research

Python Programming

Machine Learning

Scientific Experimentation

Problem-Solving

Collaboration

Communication Skills

Education

Advanced Degree in Biological Sciences

Professional Experience in Biology Research

Tools

Technical Infrastructure for ML

Job description

We’re building a team that will research and mitigate extreme risks from future models.

This team will intensively red-team models to test the most significant risks they might be capable of in areas such as biosecurity, cybersecurity risks, or autonomy. We believe that clear demonstrations can significantly advance technical research and mitigations, as well as identify effective policy interventions to promote and incentivize safety.

As part of this team, you will lead research to baseline current models and test whether future frontier capabilities could cause significant harm. Day-to-day, you may decide you need to finetune a model to see whether it becomes superhuman in an eval you’ve designed; whiteboard a threat model with a national security expert; test a new training procedure or how a model uses a tool; or brief government, labs, and other research teams. Our goal is to see the frontier before we get there.

Our CBRN workstream is hiring for a Research Scientist, with an emphasis on biosecurity risks (as outlined in our Responsible Scaling Policy). By nature, this team will be an unusual combination of backgrounds. We are particularly looking for people with experience in these domains:

• Biosecurity: You're a biologist who's concerned about the implications of AI development. You're an academic who researches biosecurity defense. You have experience modeling biological phenomena or developing advanced threat modeling simulations.
• Science: You’re an ML researcher who builds agents to augment chemistry or biology research. You’ve built a protein language model and you enjoyed looking through the embedding space. You’re a team lead at an ML-for-drug discovery company. You’ve built software for astronauts or materials scientists.
• Evaluations: You’ve managed a large-scale benchmark development project, in AI or other domains. You have ideas about how AI and ML evaluations can be better.

Do not rule yourself out if you do not fit one of those categories - it’s plausible the people we’re looking for do not fit any of the above! If you think about the most significant upsides and downsides of AI, and you can do good research to get glimpses of what those look like, please consider applying.

Please note: We will only be considering candidates who can be based in the Bay Area for this role. We have a strong preference for candidates who can start ASAP, and ideally by May 2025.

Responsibilities

• Independently lead research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives
• Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models
• Synthesize biosecurity research to establish thresholds of concern for AI capabilities
• Work with external partners to develop novel evaluations to accurately assess the biosecurity implications of our models
• Partner closely with researchers, data scientists, policy experts, and other cross-functional partners to advance Anthropic’s safety mission
• Communicate our findings to external stakeholders, such as policymakers

You may be a good fit if you

• Have one of:
• An advanced degree (MS or PhD) in the biological sciences (Molecular Biology, Computational Biology, Bioengineering)
• Significant professional experience in biology research (including wet-lab)
• Take pride in writing clean, well-documented code in Python that others can build upon
• Have a track record of using technical infrastructure to interface effectively with machine learning models
• Have familiarity with prompting and engineering large language models
• Are able to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints
• Have strong problem-solving skills and a results-oriented mindset
• Have excellent communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Prefer fast-moving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts
• Care about the societal impacts of AI

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Wet lab experience in molecular biology
• Leading large projects with multiple external collaborators or stakeholders
• Developing evaluations or benchmarks for large language models
• Emerging technology policy, including in biosecurity or AI

Representative projects

• Design and implement a new evaluation to test models for CBRN risks
• Develop a detailed threat model of CBRN risks, and identify how core bottlenecks can be resolved from further evaluations
• Prepare briefing materials to share the results of an evaluation run with external research groups