Safety & Security Counsel

Anthropic

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 265,000 - 335,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and benefits

Optional equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Lovely office space

Job summary

Anthropic seeks an experienced Safety & Security Counsel to be the first‑line legal advisor on Claude and the company’s safety program. You’ll shape policy, detection, enforcement, and incident response, working across safeguards, security, product, and policy teams.

In‑house or firm background with tech, regulatory matters, and crisis management is ideal, with a focus on translating complex issues into practical guidance for executives and engineers in a fast‑moving AI environment.

Qualifications

JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar.
Experience with fast-moving, high-stakes matters (regulatory matters, crisis management, investigations).
Ability to translate legal analysis into clear, actionable steps for technical and executive audiences.

Responsibilities

Design and enforce usage policies across harm areas (policy translation to detection/enforcement).
Advise on policy enforcement frameworks and thresholds.
Counsel on sensitive escalations involving governments, regulators, and the press.
Advise on safety threat intelligence investigations and bug bounty programs.
Support safeguards and security engineering teams on tooling and data governance considerations.
Serve as first-line legal contact during safety/security incidents and incident response.

Skills

US bar admission

Legal writing

Cross-functional collaboration

Regulatory enforcement experience

Crisis management

Education

Juris Doctor (JD)

California Bar admission (preferred)

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.

About The Role

As Safety & Security Counsel, you will serve as the first‑line legal advisor counseling on the full arc of keeping Claude and Anthropic safe and secure: usage policy design and enforcement frameworks, safeguards R&D, misuse detection and response, sensitive escalations, threat intelligence, security incident response, product‑related safety and security matters, and the company's safety and security‑related regulatory and policy engagement. The issues are increasingly interdisciplinary and novel, and you will frequently be the one ideating and building a legally‑relevant framework rather than simply applying one.

Depending on interest and experience, you will own and shape an ever‑growing portfolio of issue areas across Safeguards and Security. You will also contribute to the team's capacity building efforts, including by leveraging Claude. You will work collaboratively with other legal functions on cross‑functional initiatives.

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced attorney who wants to do high‑stakes, first‑of‑its‑kind work at the center of responsible AI development and deployment, and to grow as a strategic product counsel and trusted crisis counselor in a fast‑moving environment.

Key responsibilities

Partner with Safeguards (trust & safety) policy teams on the design and iteration of usage policies across harm areas (e.g., CBRNE, cyber, user wellbeing, scaled abuse and influence operations, and distillation), including how policies translate into detection and enforcement
Advise on policy enforcement frameworks such as account actions, appeals, enforcement systems and thresholds
Counsel on sensitive escalations and strategic response, including matters involving governments, law enforcement, regulators, and the press
Advise on safety and security threat intelligence investigations, bug bounty and red‑team programs, and internal and external safety and security testing arrangements
Support safeguards and security engineering, ML, and data science teams on building new tooling and detection mechanisms, including as it relates to data governance and privacy related considerations
Serve as a first‑line legal contact for safety and security incidents, providing real‑time guidance during incident response and assessing notification and reporting obligations under applicable legal frameworks and contractual commitments
Build and maintain crisis management playbooks, escalation protocols, and self‑serve legal guidance to enable legal resource scaling
Stay abreast of key policy and regulatory developments in AI safety and security, and policy‑specific domains across relevant jurisdictions, and translate them into practical guidance for our evolving product suite

Minimum Qualifications

A JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar
Legal experience with fast‑moving, high‑stakes matters such as investigations, regulatory matters, crisis management, or enforcement work
Working knowledge of trust & safety, cybersecurity, privacy, or platform regulation, with the ability to get up to speed quickly in the areas you know less well
Technical fluency sufficient to understand system architecture, data flows, and AI model behavior, and the curiosity to learn new concepts fast
Legal writing and drafting skills sufficient to produce policy language, escalation protocols, crisis playbooks, and self‑serve guidance for non‑legal audiences
Experience coordinating multi‑stakeholder responses to time‑sensitive matters and translating legal analysis into clear actionable steps for technical and executive audiences
Strong judgment about risk assessment and decision‑making under uncertainty

Preferred Qualifications

Active membership in the California state bar
4-8+ years of relevant legal experience
In‑house (product counsel) experience at a technology company working on security and/or trust & safety issues, or law firm experience advising tech clients on regulatory investigations or enforcement matters
Experience with content moderation, platform safety (including user wellbeing issues), or crisis management
Facility working with very technical teams, including machine learning, safety and security research, infrastructure, and threat intel
Familiarity with AI systems, machine learning concepts, or experience advising on novel technology products
A low‑ego, hands‑on working style and a commitment to doing right by users and the people affected by misuse of AI systems

Application Deadline

6pm PT on Friday September 11, 2026. We encourage all interested and qualified applicants to submit their materials before this date to ensure full consideration.

Role‑specific policy

For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

Annual Salary

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

$265,000—$335,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

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 do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas 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.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.

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.

We believe 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.

Come work with us!