Research Scientist, Frontier Red Team (Emerging Risks)
San Francisco, CAFull-TimeMid-levelResearch
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 Team
- The Frontier Red Team (FRT) is a technical research team within Anthropic’s Policy organization. Our goal is to make the entire world safer in this era of advanced AI by understanding what these systems can do and building the defenses that matter.
- In 2026, we're focused on researching and ensuring safety with self-improving, highly autonomous AI systems—especially ones with cyber-physical capabilities. See our previous related work on cyberdefense, robotics, and Project Vend. This is early-stage, high-conviction research with the potential for outsized impact.
About the Role
- This Research Scientist will focus on scoping, evaluating, red teaming, and defending against societal risks caused by advanced models that emerge over the next few years. Powerful AI models may have major implications for national security, running a business, power and privacy, infrastructure, social relationships, and more. They may come as a result of the increasing integration of powerful models in our economy and social sphere.
- As an independent Research Scientist, you’ll build a research program to understand these Emerging Risks. You’ll build evals, run experiments, and look for real world signals to understand how these may come about. You’ll turn this into insights we can use to steer the development and use of the technology more positively. Compared to the team's other focuses, you will focus less on acute catastrophic risks and more on risks that emerge from increasing integration into our world.
What You’ll Do
- Design and run research experiments to understand the emerging risks models may create
- Produce internal & external artifacts (research, products, demos, dashboards, tools) that communicate the state of model capabilities
- Shape product, safeguards, and training decisions based on what you find
- Work closely with Societal Impacts (SI) and Safeguards teams
- Design and run research experiments to understand the emerging risks models may create
- Produce internal & external artifacts (research, products, demos, dashboards, tools) that communicate the state of model capabilities
- Shape product, safeguards, and training decisions based on what you find
- Work closely with Societal Impacts (SI) and Safeguards teams
Sample Projects
- Build, run, and study an autonomous AI-powered business (e.g. Project Vend), then identify the growth of real autonomous businesses in the wild using Clio and other tools
- Build a benchmark for a model’s national security capabilities
- Red team unsafeguarded models’ abilities to be used for control
- Identify indicators of models being used to scale movements that rely on social control
- Build, run, and study an autonomous AI-powered business (e.g. Project Vend), then identify the growth of real autonomous businesses in the wild using Clio and other tools
- Build a benchmark for a model’s national security capabilities
- Red team unsafeguarded models’ abilities to be used for control
- Identify indicators of models being used to scale movements that rely on social control
You May Be a Good Fit If You
- Are a fast experimentalist who ships research quickly
- Have experience creating a research program from scratch
- Are thoughtful about humanity’s adaptation to powerful AI systems in our economy and society
- Can communicate thoughtfully in written + spoken form with a wide range of stakeholders
- Can scope ambiguous research questions into tractable first projects
- Are a fast experimentalist who ships research quickly
- Have experience creating a research program from scratch
- Are thoughtful about humanity’s adaptation to powerful AI systems in our economy and society
- Can communicate thoughtfully in written + spoken form with a wide range of stakeholders
- Can scope ambiguous research questions into tractable first projects
Strong candidates may also have experience with
- Building & maintaining large, foundational infrastructure
- Building simple interfaces that allow non-technical collaborators to evaluate AI systems
- Working with and prioritizing requests from a wide variety of stakeholders, including research and product teams
- Building & maintaining large, foundational infrastructure
- Building simple interfaces that allow non-technical collaborators to evaluate AI systems
- Working with and prioritizing requests from a wide variety of stakeholders, including research and product teams
- 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.
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.
