Policy Design Manager, Conventional Weapons

About the role

Anthropic's Safeguards organization builds the policies, evaluations, and enforcement systems that define and hold the limits on how Claude can be used. In this role, you'll own our conventional weapons work.

Defining a crisp boundary between acceptable and harmful requests in this domain is difficult, because the underlying components are dual-use: the same capabilities that serve civilian engineering and research can also contribute to a weapons system. Building the threat models, evaluations, and detection systems that hold that boundary is the core of this role.

Conventional weapons are increasingly defined by software, and the risks reach well beyond firearms: from a model operating a weapons system or writing guidance code, to the weaponization of dual-use platforms. The role spans every weapon class, up to autonomous systems that select and engage targets without human authorization.

You will help define the line between prohibited weapons development and legitimate research and engineering work, and how to operationalize the distinction. This will include translating technical judgment into principles that engineers can implement and enforcement teams can act on.

Key responsibilities

• Own and maintain Anthropic's conventional weapons policy, defining the boundary between the activities our models should and should not support

• Build the threat models and evaluations that measure how our models could contribute to weapons development, including the software and autonomy components that define modern weapons systems, and keep them current as the technology and its misuse evolve

• Partner with engineering to turn the policy into model guardrails, detection systems, and enforcement tooling

• Serve as the subject-matter expert for escalations involving conventional weapons content, including rapid response to emerging risks

• Build shared understanding of the policy across product, engineering, legal, and leadership, communicating its reasoning to technical and non-technical audiences

• Engage external experts as well as government and industry partners, and translate that engagement into stronger policy and enforcement

Minimum qualifications

• Have deep, applied expertise in weapons systems and can translate complex technical evidence into sound policy judgments

• Experience in a relevant setting, such as a service research laboratory, a defense research or innovation agency, or a company that designs or builds weapons systems

• Can write clear, operationally precise policy and explain complex technical topics to non-specialist audiences

• Understand the legal frameworks governing weapons and their transfer, and can craft policy that holds up across jurisdictions

• Can do rigorous technical analysis of weapons systems using only open sources

• Are comfortable with ambiguity and drawn to problems that have no established playbook

• Are motivated by preventing misuse without obstructing the legitimate work in the field

Preferred qualifications

• A working understanding of machine learning and large language model fundamentals

• Hands-on engineering experience in a weapons-relevant technical domain, such as systems engineering, robotics and autonomy, guidance/navigation/control, sensors and signal processing, aerospace or mechanical engineering, materials and energetics, or embedded software

• Hands-on experience applying arms export controls (ITAR/EAR) or international arms-control regimes

• Experience building or evaluating classifiers, including LLM-based ones, and reasoning about precision and recall for rare, high-consequence categories

• Trust & safety or product policy experience at a technology platform