Public Policy, Political Research

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 seeking an experienced political researcher to help build Anthropic's in-house polling and research function. This role will be fundamental to understanding how key audiences—from key opinion formers including policymakers and third party groups to the general public—perceive and respond to Anthropic's policy positions, messages, and campaigns. This is the first Policy team hire for a function that will become a critical capability that helps Anthropic achieve our policy goals.

The Central Policy team sits at the operational heart of Anthropic's policy function—distinct from government relations and communications, but essential to enabling both. You'll work cross-functionally to ensure our policy and comms strategy is grounded in a rigorous understanding of stakeholder sentiment. The polling insights you generate will directly feed into high-visibility campaigns and will be a key asset in our policy campaign efforts in Washington and beyond.

Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about safe development of AI systems and build partnerships with governments through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. This role offers a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of AI policy, bringing rigorous research discipline to policy strategy and directly shaping how the organization understands and engages with stakeholders.

Success in this role means establishing trusted relationships with top-tier polling firms all over the world, delivering high-quality research on a regular cadence, and becoming the internal expert on how key audiences perceive AI, Anthropic, and Anthropic’s positions and messages. You'll translate polling insights into strategic recommendations that measurably improve campaign effectiveness, and build scalable processes that allow the function to grow efficiently as demand increases.

In this role, you will:

• Establish and manage strategic relationships with premier polling firms at scale

• Design and execute polling research strategy including proactive and rapid-response polling to shape Anthropic’s policy strategy and tactical responses

• Synthesize polling insights and translate them into actionable strategic recommendations that inform policy campaigns, collateral, and paid media

• Serve as a thought partner with external affairs colleagues (federal, state, international) and policy comms to identify research priorities and ensure findings drive effective strategy and messaging

• Build and scale the research function by establishing workflows, best practices, and systems that make insights accessible and actionable across the policy team

• Develop a comprehensive strategy for our in-house political research function that aligns with Anthropic's policy goals

• Identify, evaluate, and establish relationships with premier research and polling firms ensuring coverage across demographics, geographies, and political perspectives

• Conduct detailed, proactive research to test core messages, policy proposals, campaign themes, and evaluate Anthropic's brand perception and performance

• Execute rapid-response polling to quickly assess Anthropic's messaging strategy in response to external events, policymaker actions, competitive developments, or emerging opportunities

• Work with external affairs colleagues (federal, state, and international) and policy comms to identify research priorities, interpret findings, and translate insights into actionable strategic recommendations

• Develop and maintain a knowledge management system for polling data, insights, and recommendations that ensures findings are accessible and actionable

• Manage polling vendors at scale, including vendor performance management

• Participate in strategy sessions and provide thought partnership on the design of messages, policy proposals, and campaigns before polling testing

• Create clear, compelling deliverables that distill polling findings into insights and recommendations

• Identify opportunities to build and scale the polling function over time, including staffing needs, process improvements, and capability expansion

• Track and report on the impact and utility of research, measuring how insights translate into more effective campaigns and strategic decisions

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have at least 10 years of professional experience in political research, ideally spanning multiple campaign cycles and policy environments

• Have corporate public affairs experience, ideally in a highly scrutinized or regulated industry

• Are a distinctive strategic thinker who can spot emergent issues, identify and test the right messages, and translate those insights into tactical recommendations

• Have a proven track record as a relationship builder, particularly managing vendors, external experts, and complex stakeholder ecosystems

• Are highly organized and excel at managing multiple projects simultaneously, maintaining clear priorities and delivering on tight timelines

• Are comfortable operating in ambiguous environments, taking ownership of problems, and proactively driving initiatives with limited precedent

• Are scrappy and hard-working, but also humble, genuinely collaborative, and a strong team player

• Are passionate about AI policy and align with Anthropic's safety mission and commitment to responsible AI development

• Hold at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field

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