Research Scientist, Frontier Red Team (Emerging Risks) · Anthropic

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:49:35 GMT
Engineering

Anthropic · San Francisco, CA · $320,000 - $850,000USD · hybrid

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.

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

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

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

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

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.