External Affairs, Director Federal Policy Coalitions

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

We are looking for a Public Policy expert to build and manage Anthropic’s relationships with think tanks, coalitions, trade associations, and advocacy organizations to advance AI policy outcomes aligned with our mission.

You will identify and recruit coalition partners, coordinate advocacy campaigns across multiple organizations, and leverage external credibility to shape policy debates. This means translating our policy goals into coalition strategies, managing relationships with diverse stakeholders across the ideological spectrum, and building a network that can deliver both intellectual leadership and advocacy impact.

You should have a track record of building coalitions that win policy outcomes. We need someone who can build relationships and trust, recruit stakeholders from diverse perspectives, manage competing interests, and engage with third-party voices strategically.

Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about safe development of AI systems, and build partnership with governments and civil society through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. We approach AI policy from first principles rather than defensive industry posture. Our positioning is distinctive, and we need someone who can execute tailored third-party strategies that reflect this approach while maintaining broad, effective coalitions.

In this role, you will:

• Build relationships with think tanks, academic institutions, trade associations, and advocacy groups, spanning the ideological spectrum, that can advance our policy priorities
• Translate policy objectives into coalition strategies, identify which organizations can provide research, testimony, or advocacy that moves specific outcomes
• Coordinate trade association engagement, working with government relations colleagues on membership strategy and advocacy alignment
• Manage coalitions with diverse interests and perspectives, finding common ground and coordinating collective advocacy across traditional divides
• Work with government relations, central policy, and communications teams to align third-party engagement with direct advocacy
• Facilitate third-party contributions to policy debates through research, testimony, regulatory comments, and media engagement
• Build Anthropic’s credibility as a coalition partner and track the impact of coalition activities on policy outcomes

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 10+ years building and managing coalitions in policy environments, with demonstrated wins on legislative or regulatory outcomes
• Understand how Washington policy organizations work—think tanks, trade associations, advocacy groups, and their different incentives and constraints
• Have experience working with policy research and advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum, ideally with relationship depth among conservative organizations
• Have built coalitions that span partisan and ideological divides, particularly including center-right organizations
• Can map stakeholder interests and find alignment opportunities across organizations with competing priorities and diverse perspectives
• Have managed coalition operations, membership structures, advocacy coordination, partner negotiations, maintaining cohesion over time
• Can translate technical positions into accessible messaging that organizations with different orientations can use effectively
• Know when to leverage third-party credibility versus direct company advocacy
• Are based in or willing to relocate to Washington DC

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.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an Application if you’re interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we’re building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

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.