Regional State and Local Affairs Lead, Southern States

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.

We are looking for a State and Local Affairs Lead to lead Anthropic's engagement with state and local governments across the Southern United States, advancing AI policy, legislation, and regulation that supports Anthropic's mission of ensuring that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI.

In this role, you will work closely with Anthropic's Southern Regional State and Local Lead, as well as coordinate with our Policy leadership, Communications, and Legal teams. You will own Anthropic's relationships and legislative and regulatory work across the South—engagement with state legislatures, governors' offices, attorneys general, state agencies, and local governments. You will be based in Texas and will travel regularly across the region.

Successful candidates will demonstrate a track record of political strategy and execution—with specific examples of how you have contributed to complex policy campaigns, built durable relationships with elected officials and community leaders, supported legislative and regulatory outcomes, and executed with accountability and focus in fast-paced environments.

Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about safe development of AI systems, and build partnership with governments through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. We recognize that our approach to AI policy is genuinely distinctive in the marketplace—grounded in honest assessment of technological trajectories and authentic concern for safe scaling—and we need a regional lead who can bring that positioning to life at the state and local level.

This role offers an opportunity to be part of building a high-impact state affairs operation at a critical moment for AI policy. You will be responsible for executing on strategic priorities across your region, building relationships with government stakeholders, and contributing to the broader state affairs function.

Key responsibilities

Minimum qualifications

• Serve as Anthropic's lead for state and local government affairs across the Southern United States, working in close coordination with the other Regional State and Local Affairs Leads
• Build and maintain relationships with state legislators, legislative staff, governors' offices, attorneys general, and state agency leaders across your region
• Engage directly with local officials whose decisions affect Anthropic's work—mayors, city councils, county commissions, and economic development boards
• Track state and local legislation and regulatory proceedings affecting AI and the technology sector, provide analysis and intelligence to inform company strategy, and represent Anthropic's positions
• Build durable partnerships with local and regional organizations, including chambers of commerce, economic development groups, labor organizations, universities, and school districts

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

• 8+ years of experience in state and local government affairs, political strategy, or legislative roles
• Exposure to technology policy or emerging technology regulation, and an understanding of the unique challenges of navigating policy for rapidly evolving technologies
• Drawn to working with an organization that approaches AI policy with intensity and intellectual honesty

$230,000—$265,000 USD

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.