Policy Design Manager, Conventional Weapons
at Anthropic
Design leadership: Joel Lewenstein — Head of Product Design. Checked .
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
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
Listed August 22, 2026. Sourced from the original posting. D1S1 is not the employer and does not process applications.
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