Policy Design Manager, Conventional Weapons

The role

You will own the conventional weapons policy for the Safeguards organization. You will build threat models, evaluations, and detection systems to define the boundary between acceptable and harmful requests. You will also partner with engineering to turn policy into model guardrails and enforcement tooling.

What you will do

• Own and maintain Anthropic's conventional weapons policy
• Build threat models and evaluations to measure model contribution to weapons development
• Partner with engineering to turn policy into model guardrails, detection systems, and enforcement tooling
• Serve as the subject-matter expert for escalations involving conventional weapons content
• Build shared understanding of the policy across product, engineering, legal, and leadership
• Engage external experts as well as government and industry partners

Required qualifications

• Deep, applied expertise in weapons systems
• Experience in a relevant setting, such as a service research laboratory, a defense research or innovation agency, or a company that designs or builds weapons systems
• Can write clear, operationally precise policy
• Can explain complex technical topics to non-specialist audiences
• Understand the legal frameworks governing weapons and their transfer
• Can craft policy that holds up across jurisdictions
• Can do rigorous technical analysis of weapons systems using only open sources
• Comfortable with ambiguity
• Motivated by preventing misuse without obstructing legitimate work
• Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Field of study relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Nice to have

• A working understanding of machine learning and large language model fundamentals
• Hands-on engineering experience in a weapons-relevant technical domain, such as systems engineering, robotics and autonomy, guidance/navigation/control, sensors and signal processing, aerospace or mec
• Hands-on experience applying arms export controls (ITAR/EAR) or international arms-control regimes
• Experience building or evaluating classifiers, including LLM-based ones, and reasoning about precision and recall for rare, high-consequence categories
• Trust & safety or product policy experience at a technology platform

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Optional equity donation matching
• Generous vacation and parental leave
• Flexible working hours
• Office space

Before you apply

• We do sponsor visas, though we are not able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate

About the company

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. Its mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.