State and Local Affairs Lead, West

Anthropic; United States; Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a State and Local Affairs Lead to engage with Western state governments, advancing AI policy and regulation aligned with Anthropic's mission. You will report to the Head of Western State and Local Affairs and coordinate with Policy, Communications, and Legal teams.

You will build relationships with legislators, governors, attorneys general, agencies, and local officials, traveling regularly across the region.

Qualifications

• Experience in state and local government affairs with policy outcomes.
• Existing relationships with Western state leaders (legislators, governors, attorneys general).
• Willingness to travel regularly and work in a policy-fast environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead state and local government affairs for multiple Western states.
• Build and maintain relationships with legislators, governors' offices, AGs, and agency leaders.
• Engage directly with local officials—mayors, councils, county boards.
• Track legislation and regulatory proceedings; provide analysis to inform strategy.
• Partner with chambers, economic groups, labor, universities, and districts.
• Represent Anthropic at hearings, events, and public forums.

Skills

Political strategy

Stakeholder engagement

Public speaking

Relationship building

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

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

We are looking for a State and Local Affairs Lead to engage with state and local governments in the Western United States, advancing AI policy, legislation, and regulation that supports Anthropic's mission of ensuring that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI.

In this role, you will report to Anthropic's Head of Western State and Local Affairs and coordinate with our Policy leadership, Communications, and Legal teams. You will own Anthropic's relationships and legislative and regulatory work across many Western states, including a support role in California —engagement with state legislatures, governors' offices, attorneys general, state agencies, and local governments. You will travel regularly across the region.

Successful candidates will demonstrate a track record of political strategy and execution—with specific examples of how you have contributed to complex policy campaigns, built durable relationships with elected officials and community leaders, supported legislative and regulatory outcomes, and executed with accountability and focus in fast-moving environments.

Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about safe development of AI systems, and build partnership with governments through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. We recognize that our approach to AI policy is distinctive—grounded in honest assessment of technological trajectories and authentic concern for safe scaling—and we need a regional lead who can bring that positioning to life at the state and local level.

This role offers an opportunity to be part of building a high-impact state affairs operation at a critical moment for AI policy. You will be responsible for executing on strategic priorities across your region, building relationships with government stakeholders, and contributing to the broader state affairs function.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as Anthropic's lead for state and local government affairs across many Western states, working in close coordination with the Head of Western States and other Regional State and Local Affairs Leads
• Build and maintain relationships with state legislators, legislative staff, governors' offices, attorneys general, and state agency leaders across your region
• Engage directly with local officials whose decisions affect Anthropic's work—mayors, city councils, county commissions, and economic development boards
• Track state and local legislation and regulatory proceedings affecting AI and the technology sector, provide analysis and intelligence to inform company strategy, and represent Anthropic's positions
• Build durable partnerships with local and regional organizations, including chambers of commerce, economic development groups, labor organizations, universities, and school districts
• Represent Anthropic at legislative hearings, regional events, and public forums, including with audiences who are skeptical of AI
• Work with the Communications team to develop clear, accurate messaging for regional policy campaigns
• Translate Anthropic's technical research and policy positions into engagement strategies tailored to Western state political environments
• Manage the outside advisors and registered lobbyists who support Anthropic's work in your region
• Coordinate with Anthropic's policy, communications, legal, and executive teams to ensure that regional activity aligns with company-wide positioning

Minimum Qualifications

• Align with our mission and embrace the imperative of policy impact and change
• Have experience in state and local government affairs, political strategy, or legislative roles, with demonstrated success contributing to legislative and regulatory outcomes
• Have existing relationships with state and local leaders in the West, including legislators, governors' offices, attorneys general, or county and municipal officials
• Understand how state legislatures and executive branches work—committee processes, legislative and regulatory procedures, and how to move policy forward—and understand where local authority begins and ends
• Have a track record of executing on strategic objectives and delivering measurable outcomes in government affairs roles
• Are prepared to travel regularly across the region

Preferred Qualifications

• Have 8+ years of experience in state and local government affairs, political strategy, or legislative roles
• Have experience building partnerships with external organizations including chambers of commerce, economic development groups, labor organizations, and universities
• Have exposure to technology policy or emerging technology regulation; you understand the unique challenges of navigating policy for rapidly evolving technologies
• Demonstrate understanding of how to build coalitions and identify aligned constituencies to advance shared objectives
• Can manage multiple priorities and stakeholder relationships across different states and adapt to different political environments
• Can work well under time pressure and manage competing demands
• Can translate complex technical topics into clear, accessible language for policymakers and residents alike
• Have experience working with communications teams to develop effective messaging for policy campaigns
• Are comfortable being honest about tradeoffs, including in rooms where people disagree with us
• Are drawn to working with an organization that approaches AI policy with intensity and intellectual honesty

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.

Annual Salary

$230,000—$265,000 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.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

Your safety matters to us.

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.

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