Political Economist, Rule of Law
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY; Washington, DC
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 Anthropic has done pioneering work examining the economic impacts of AI. The AI & Rule of Law team takes an analogous approach to a different question: how will AI affect our constitutional democratic institutions? Increasingly powerful AI systems will put pressure on societal functions at every level — the courts, legislatures, electoral systems, oversight bodies, and the legal frameworks that hold democratic governance together. Our team exists to ask hard questions about those vulnerabilities, and to seek out strategies for protecting democratic freedoms — in the short and long term, through both technical and policy levers. This is early, high-stakes research. The team is small, the problems are genuinely unsolved, and the work will matter. We are looking for someone with deep expertise in both AI and at least one of: law, government, political science, or public policy. The ideal candidate understands the technical landscape well enough to reason about AI capabilities and risks, and understands democratic institutions well enough to see where those risks become structural threats. Key responsibilities Projects on this team are illustrative rather than fixed — we expect the research agenda to evolve as both AI capabilities and institutional pressures change. Current and expected focus areas include: Making fundamental contributions to the development and expansion of our public data and research on how people use AI for politics, including regular reports and deep dives on elections and policy topics, and grow into leading this work over time Designing and conduct empirical research on AI’s political effects, drawing on external data sources and the privacy-preserving measurement systems internally Designing, running, and analyzing experiments on systems of many AI agents, testing whether and when tools from political economy (rules, monitoring, voting, dispute resolution) help agents govern themselves and stay under human oversight Developing new methodological approaches for studying AI’s impact on: Developing measurement and causal-inference tooling to help Anthropic evaluate the downstream political consequences of its own training, product, and policy decisions Building and maintaining relationships with academic institutions, policy think tanks, and other research partners, and serve as the point of contact for outside researchers who use our data Working cross-functionally with other technical teams to improve our measurement infrastructure and data collection Translating research insights into actionable recommendations for model training, product decisions, and policy discussions Amplifying external engagement through research publications, policy briefs, convenings, and presentations to diverse stakeholders Minimum qualifications A primary degree in law, political science, or a closely related field at the Ph.D. level A computational research background in Political Science, Economics, or a related field Demonstrated ability to produce rigorous, public-facing work — scholarship, policy analysis, government output, or a published body of writing Preferred qualifications Experience relevant to the study of AI’s impact on politics Track record of empirical research, particularly studies combining novel data sources and game theory or those implementing frontier methods in causal inference Comfort operating with significant autonomy in an environment where the problems are new and the playbook is still being written At least five years of relevant experience in academia, industry, or government Some Examples of Our Recent Work Pr