Research Engineer / Scientist, Model Welfare
New Today
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 As a Research Engineer/Scientist within the newly formed Model Welfare program, you will be among the first to work to better understand, evaluate, and address concerns about the potential welfare and moral status of AI systems. You are curious about the intersection of machine learning, ethics, and safety and are adept at navigating technical and philosophical uncertainty. You’ll run technical research projects to investigate model characteristics of plausible relevance to welfare, consciousness, or related properties and will design and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate the risk of welfare harms. Your work will often involve collaboration with other teams, including Interpretability, Finetuning, Alignment Science, and Safeguards.
Our announcement of the model welfare program , and our welfare assessment of Claude Opus 4 (published in the System Card ) give a sense of some of our early work.
Note: We expect this role to be based in the San Francisco office.
Possible projects Investigate and improve the reliability of introspective self-reports from models
Collaborate with Interpretability to explore potentially welfare-relevant features and circuits
Improve and expand our welfare assessments for future frontier models
Evaluate the presence of potentially welfare-relevant capabilities and characteristics as a function of model scale
Develop strategies for making high-trust/verifiable commitments to models
Explore possible interventions and deploy them into production (e.g. allowing models to end harmful or distressing interactions)
You may be a good fit if you… Have significant applied software, ML, or research engineering experience
Have experience contributing to empirical AI research projects and/or technical AI safety research
Can reliably turn abstract theories into creative, tractable research hypotheses and experiments
Prefer to move fast and iterate rather than run long extensive projects
Are excited to dive into new technical areas on a regular basis
Care about the possible impacts of AI development on humans and the AI systems themselves
Strong candidates may also… Have authored research papers in machine learning, NLP, AI safety, interpretability, and/or LLM psychology and behavior
Be familiar with moral philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, or related fields (however, such experience will not substitute for technical research engineering skills)
Be effective science communicators with a track record of public communication
Have strong project management skills
Candidates need not have: 100% of the skills needed to perform the job
Formal certifications or education credentials
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- Location:
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- Salary:
- $200,000 - $250,000
- Category:
- Engineering