Commercial Counsel, SPARC

New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA

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

We're looking for a Commercial Counsel, SPARC (Safety, Policy, and Research Contracts) to join our legal team at the forefront of shaping how cutting-edge AI technology reaches users, researchers, and enterprises worldwide. You'll work alongside experienced colleagues who operate as true strategic partners (moving fast, thinking creatively, and working collaboratively) on cutting-edge AI safety and research agreements, including threat-sharing frameworks with leading security organizations and collaborations that shape and advance responsible AI development standards. You'll also focus on supporting our Go-to-Market teams, handling enterprise agreements and customer negotiations. This is an excellent opportunity for a motivated attorney to develop deep expertise in their commercial transactions career while contributing directly to responsible AI development.

Key responsibilities

• Draft, review, and negotiate commercial agreements, focusing mainly on AI safety and research agreements, as well as GTM/Sales transactions including enterprise customer contracts

• Partner closely with Sales and Go-to-Market teams to support deal velocity and provide practical legal guidance

• Help build and maintain commercial legal infrastructure, including contract templates, playbooks, and process improvements

• Partner with Policy, Safeguards, and Research teams on novel AI governance initiatives

• Identify and escalate legal risks appropriately while supporting business momentum

• Stay current on legal developments affecting AI technologies

Minimum qualifications

• J.D. and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred)

• Experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating commercial agreements

• Demonstrated ability to provide clear, practical legal guidance to non-lawyers on complex commercial law matters

Preferred qualifications

• Commercial experience supporting research collaborations and sponsored research and grant giving programs

• Curiosity about AI technology and AI policy, and a commitment to responsible AI development

• Experience with biotech, clinical research, or other life sciences transactions

• Familiarity with grant-making or grant-funded arrangements, including funding terms and compliance considerations

• Experience advising on partnerships with non-profit foundations, academic institutions, or industry trade groups

• Comfort advising research teams whose work doesn't follow a standard commercial playbook

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate legal concepts for non-legal audiences

• A collaborative approach to working with colleagues and external partners

• Experience navigating multi-stakeholder agreements involving technical and policy considerations

• Ability to adapt to shifting priorities in a fast-paced environment

• Experience with SaaS agreements or other technology transactions

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.

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