Commercial Counsel, Hardware

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

Hardware is becoming critical to how AI gets built, and the legal questions are as new as the technology. We're hiring a Commercial Counsel, Hardware to help Anthropic's product teams move fast, build safely, and get the legal calls right.

In this role, you'll negotiate a high volume of fast-moving deals for hardware, components, software, and emerging technology procurement needs. This role will also lead multifaceted technology, data, and partnership deals, many of them the first of their kind at Anthropic.

You'll be the legal and risk partner that technical and business leaders turn to when they need a fast, practical read on a deal or purchase. You'll clear low risk transactions quickly, spot the ones that deserve a closer look, and build scalable solutions as new complexities come up, all while working alongside Procurement and Finance and Legal colleagues in areas like privacy, IP, and trade. Along the way, you'll also support partnerships with major tech companies, universities, and media organizations, which gives you a view across much of the business.

Key responsibilities

• Negotiate and close a high volume of agreements for hardware and components, including review of embedded firmware and companion software licenses

• Structure and negotiate complex technology, data, and partnership agreements

• Track legal and regulatory changes that affect hardware products and components, such as product safety rules and restrictions on foreign-made components, and explain what they mean for our plans

• Identify trade, export control, sanctions, and supply chain concerns in cross-border sourcing, and work with our national security and compliance teams to resolve them

• Build and maintain self-serve guidance, templates, and AI-assisted review tools so routine purchases don't wait on Legal

• Manage outside counsel for specialist questions and overflow volume

• Cover other technology or hardware transactions on the Legal team as needed

Minimum qualifications

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

• Hands-on experience buying hardware and firmware, components, and software in high volume, fast-paced environments

• Deep experience leading complex deals, such as technology or data licensing, joint development, or supply partnerships

• Working knowledge of international supply chains and how sourcing choices (and their associated risks) show up in contracts (lead times, single-source risk, warranties, country of origin, higher risk jurisdictions)

• Working knowledge of trade and regulatory compliance for hardware, including export controls, sanctions, tariffs and customs

• Clear, plain communication with scientists, engineers, and operators, so legal risk turns into a decision they can act on

• A low-ego, "doer" attitude and real interest in taking on work outside your core practice area

• Intense curiosity about AI and emerging hardware, and a commitment to responsible AI development

Preferred qualifications

• At least 8 years of legal experience in hardware or a closely related technical space, with the judgment to run risk assessments and deals on your own from day one

• In-house time at a hardware-intensive technology company (such as electronics, industrial automation, or complex devices) while it was scaling quickly

• Experience supporting product or engineering teams as a dedicated counsel

• Experience with facilities or on-site vendor services, including the insurance and safety questions

• An engineering, product, or other technical background

• Experience using AI tools to speed up your own legal work

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

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.