Research Scientist, Societal Impacts

Anthropic
San Francisco, CA, USA2026-01-21

About the job

As a Societal Impacts research scientist on the Models Research Pod, you'll close the loop between observing Claude's behavior and improving it at the model level. You'll use observational tools like Clio to analyze real-world usage patterns and build evaluations that assess whether Claude provides safe responses aligned with its Constitution.

Responsibilities

Using observational tools like Clio to analyze real-world usage patterns and surface insights about how people interact with Claude.

Building and running evaluations to assess Claude's behavior across key dimensions of its Constitution, such as safety and quality of advice in high-stakes situations.

Partnering closely with fine-tuning, safeguards, policy, and interpretability teams to translate research insights into model improvements.

Generating insights about the societal impact of Anthropic's systems and using this understanding to inform company strategy, research priorities, and policy positions.

Sharing your work through research publications and external presentations, and developing tools and frameworks that make AI systems more understandable to policymakers, academics, and civil society.

Qualifications

Minimum

You have experience working with machine learning systems and are comfortable with technical infrastructure for interfacing with models.

You have an interest in societal impacts research; prior experience in this area is a plus but not required.

You're adaptable and collaborative, able to take direction and contribute to team priorities rather than needing to pursue a predetermined research agenda.

You're skilled at writing up and communicating your results, even when they're null or unexpected.

You find it exciting to partner with colleagues across teams on large-scale projects where the whole company contributes to building and analyzing AI systems.

You have a background in machine learning, data science, or another technical field that involves generating insights from complex systems.

You're passionate about translating research insights into actionable recommendations for improving AI systems and informing policy.

Preferred

For senior candidates: you're willing to do hands-on work while also helping shape research direction, and you may be interested in management opportunities down the line.