Conceptual Reasoning Fellow

Program Overview:

Many of the questions that will shape our future have no single checkable answer. Reasoning well about them, whether in law, policy, philosophy, economics, cognitive science, or AI safety itself, takes the kind of judgment experts spend years building. We believe frontier AI, developed safely, can become a real partner on these questions, but getting there means working closely with the people who know these fields best.

This fellowship brings researchers and experts from philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy, and law into Anthropic for four months to work alongside our research teams. Fellows pair deep domain expertise with our frontier models and internal tooling to evaluate, improve, and apply Claude's capabilities in their field.

What to Expect:

• A concrete, scoped project matched to your background, with mentorship from Anthropic researchers.
• Access to frontier Claude models and internal evaluation tooling.
• A cohort of incoming Fellows to collaborate with and a connection to Anthropic's broader research community.

Compensation:

$100,000–$167,000 USD for the four-month fellowship (equivalent to $300,000–$500,000 USD annualized), and other benefits.

Key Responsibilities:

• Identifying key open problems in your field, assessing approaches to solving them, and using Claude to make progress on them.
• Identifying grand societal challenges which the expertise of your field is crucial for addressing, and assessing Claude's strengths and weaknesses in tackling them.
• Designing evaluations and RL environments that test models in your field systematically, turning your expertise into working tests of how well Claude reasons in your field.
• Teaming up with other Fellows in your field to build environments that push Claude on the hardest, most judgment-heavy problems your discipline has to offer.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Are excited about the potential for AI to reason well about hard questions in their field where expert judgment matters.
• Hands-on experience using Claude and Claude Code in your day-to-day workflow.
• Hold (or are completing) a PhD in philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy or law, or have equivalent research experience.
• Are comfortable working in a fast-paced, high-agency atmosphere for a few months and delivering concrete results.
• Existing authorization to work in the United States for the duration of the program.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing evaluations, benchmarks, datasets, or expert rubrics.
• Demonstrated expertise in your field, shown through research, scholarship, or expert-level analytical writing.

Representative Projects:

• A philosopher building hard cases that require normative judgment in ethics or formal epistemology.
• A cognitive scientist designing experimental-design and model-comparison tasks.
• An economist writing modelling and identification problems with ground truth.
• A policy scholar drafting regulatory and cost-benefit analysis tasks with expert rubrics.
• A legal scholar building AI-policy-relevant law datasets.

Logistics - Fellows:

• The program runs from January 12th to May 8th 2027, and is full-time for the duration; some fellowships may be considered for an extension.
• Applications are open until October 28, 2026, and offers are planned by November 20th. Later stages will typically include a take-home exercise and conversations with the research team and potential mentors.
• All Fellows attend a one-week in-person orientation in San Francisco.
• The default location is San Francisco. Remote engagements within the United States will be considered in certain circumstances.
• Anthropic is not currently able to sponsor visas for Fellows. Fellows need full-time work authorization in the United States.
• This is a fixed-term contract position. Fellows are engaged through an employer of record, rather than employed directly by Anthropic.

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.