Research Resident

About the role

The Anthropic Residency is our paid, fixed-term research program, with placements lasting between six weeks and six months. We are looking for people who have led ambitious work in a variety of technical fields and want to transition to full-time work focused on making sure AI systems are safe and beneficial for all of humanity. If you are a professor in a quantitative discipline, a technical founder or a staff-level engineer and want to transition to work on transformative AI, we want to hear from you. Background in machine learning is not required.

What to expect

• A concrete, scoped project matched to your background, with direct mentorship from Anthropic researchers
• Access to Claude models and GPU compute
• Connection to the broader AI safety and security research community

Interview process

The interview process will include an initial application, recruiter screen, technical assessment, research discussion and a reference check.

Applications for this round close on November 22, 2026 (11:59 PM PT). We expect to make offers in January 2027.

You may be a good fit if you

• Are motivated by making sure AI is safe and beneficial for society as a whole
• Are excited to transition into working on empirical AI research full-time
• Have led ambitious work in a variety of technical fields (professor in a quantitative discipline, a technical founder or a staff-level engineer)
• Thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments
• Can implement ideas quickly and communicate clearly

Strong candidates may also

• Have experience authoring research papers in machine learning, NLP, or AI safety
• Have experience with LLMs, reinforcement learning or Kubernetes clusters and complex shared codebases

Mentors and research areas

Potential Anthropic mentors include:

• Sara Price: leads the Alignment Training team; background in data science
• Ethan Perez: leads the Alignment Science team; background in machine learning
• Evan Hubinger: leads the Alignment Stress-Testing team; formerly at The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
• Samuel Marks: leads the Scalable Oversight team; background in mathematics
• Elana Simon: researches the interpretability of language models and biological models; background in biomedical informatics
• Belinda Li: researches how language models represent the world, users, and themselves; background in natural language processing (PhD, MIT)
• Jack Lindsey: leads the Model Psychology team; background in theoretical neuroscience
• Nicholas Carlini: researches adversarial machine learning and AI security; previously at DeepMind and Google Brain
• Jascha Sohl-Dickstein: works at the intersection of safety and pretraining; background in physics and neuroscience, formerly Principal Scientist at Google Brain

Residents will work on empirical research questions in collaboration with Anthropic's research teams. Areas we are particularly interested in include:

AI safety & alignment

• Scalable Oversight: Developing techniques to keep highly capable models helpful and honest, even as they surpass human-level intelligence in various domains.
• Adversarial Robustness and AI Control: Creating methods to ensure advanced AI systems remain safe and harmless in unfamiliar or adversarial scenarios.
• Model Organisms: Creating model organisms of misalignment to improve our empirical understanding of how alignment failures might arise.
• Model Internals and Interpretability: Advancing our understanding of the internal workings of large language models to enable more targeted interventions and safety measures.
• Safeguards Research: Developing robust defenses against adversarial attacks, comprehensive evaluation frameworks for model safety, and automated systems to detect and mitigate potential risks before deployment.
• AI Welfare: Improving our understanding of potential AI welfare and developing related evaluations and mitigations.

AI security & frontier red-teaming

• Stress-testing frontier models to understand the full extent of their current capabilities in fields such as cybersecurity, robotics or cryptography.

ML systems & reinforcement learning

• Improving how frontier models are trained and building the infrastructure behind that research, from model architecture, optimizers and training data to accelerator simulators, hardware backends and RL environment pipelines.

For a fuller picture of the questions we care about, see our Recommendations for Technical AI Safety Research Directions and recent publications from our Alignment, Interpretability and Frontier Red teams.

Logistics

• Duration: Placements are six weeks, three months or six months, depending on team fit and candidate preferences. Other lengths between three and six months are possible by exception.
• Location: We prefer that Residents work from our San Francisco office, where most of our research staff is based, but remote participation is possible, especially for shorter placements. Most full-time research roles at Anthropic require relocation to San Francisco. Remote participants need to be based in a country where Anthropic can hire.
• Commitment: Full-time role for the duration of the residency.
• Compensation: $350,000 to $500,000/year pro-rated for the duration of the residency + benefits
• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas for placements of three months or longer. For six-week placements we encourage remote participation from a country where Anthropic can hire.

Applicants may also be considered for the Anthropic Fellows Program.

Annual Salary: 350000 - 500000 USD