IP Counsel, Transactions

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 are seeking an experienced and strategic transactional attorney to join the IP team within our growing legal department. In this role, you will be responsible for the IP side of Anthropic's transactions, partnering with the M&A and commercial counsel who lead each deal. You will conduct IP diligence and negotiate IP terms for our acquisitions and investments, help advise on IP terms in our most complex commercial and research agreements, and drive the playbooks and processes that make our processes scalable. You will partner closely with the Head of IP (direct manager), our M&A and Commercial Legal teams, and Corporate Development on questions and issues that are very often new.

Responsibilities

• Lead the IP workstream on acquisitions and strategic investments, from diligence through letters of intent, definitive agreements, closing, and integration, alongside our M&A counsel and outside counsel

• Partner with commercial counsel on the IP aspects of complex enterprise, partnership, research collaboration, and vendor agreements, advising on and negotiating IP terms

• Serve as the primary point of contact on IP terms for commercial legal and other colleagues, and help train them so they can resolve more IP questions on their own

• Drive the playbooks, templates, and processes that let a lean team handle IP terms across a high volume of deals

• Contribute to broader IP strategy, particularly where transactions intersect with open source, trade secrets, patents, or new business models

Minimum qualifications

• Hold a JD and are an active member of at least one U.S. state bar

• Have substantial experience leading IP due diligence and negotiating IP terms in technology M&A

• Have first-chair experience negotiating IP provisions in complex commercial technology agreements, such as licenses, joint development agreements, and services agreements

• Have the ability to communicate IP risks and tradeoffs clearly to business leaders and non-specialist lawyers, and to exercise sound judgment about when to hold a position

• Have strong working knowledge of open source licensing, employee and contractor IP assignment obligations, and trade secret protection

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years of transactional IP experience at a nationally recognized law firm, a technology company, or both

• Experience building negotiation playbooks, templates, or diligence processes that other lawyers relied on

• Experience with AI, machine learning, data licensing, or other emerging technology

• Curiosity about AI and a commitment to its responsible development

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.