External Affairs, Japan

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.

We are looking for an experienced Japan-based Public Policy expert to advance practical governance of increasingly powerful AI systems and support Anthropic’s commercial expansion by building relationships with external stakeholders, developing substantive policy positions and papers and engaging in regular outreach to drive progress in AI policy and AI safety, drawing upon established relationships with key policymakers and their staffs. As part of this role you will collaborate with a dynamic, geographically distributed policy team on a variety of other projects, including analyzing policy proposals, drafting submissions to requests for public comment, planning and assisting policy campaigns in Japan and potentially more broadly in Asia, and also providing policy advice to technical colleagues which you will work alongside in Tokyo. This role is crucial to advancing Anthropic's work in Asia.

In this role, you will:

• Brief a diverse set of policy and research actors that are looking to better understand AI safety and AI policy opportunities
• Convene diverse stakeholders and speak at policy events such as research announcements, discussion panels, or workshops on AI safety topics
• Analyze legislation and provide feedback that advances the creation of a market for secure, safe, and dependable AI systems.
• Support senior colleagues in external engagements by preparing meeting briefs and taking action on follow-up requests
• Develop new programming and generating opportunities for Anthropic to regularly engage with policymakers, think tanks, and non-profit organizations
• Collaborate with policy and technical teams to translate Anthropic research into concrete policy proposals, stakeholder education, and thought leadership opportunities
• Develop and amplify public submissions, responses to requests for information (RFI), and policy memos written by Anthropic to drive positive change in AI policy
• Partner with non-profit organizations and academic researchers to publish discussion papers and policy memos on how to enable responsible AI research & development

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 10+ years of professional experience in government, technology, legal, and/or other policy-relevant environments
• Have a track record of effective, information-rich advocacy with government authorities in Japan
• Demonstrate business-level English language skills
• Are energized by agency; you will be the first policy hire in Asia and will be building the operation from scratch.
• Enjoy drafting and executing complex policy campaigns that move the needle
• Thrive when engaging with policymakers, civil society, and think tanks to translate complex technical topics into accessible and relevant information
• Excel at translating high-level vision into executable operational plans
• Have demonstrated an ability to quickly get up to speed on complex technical areas and policy dynamics
• Are deeply curious about frontier technological research and are eager to work closely with technical colleagues to translate new discoveries into policy outcomes

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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. 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