Anthropic Fellows Program

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.

Apply using this link. We are accepting applications on a rolling basis for the next cohort of Anthropic Fellows, which is expected to start in late September. In some circumstances, we can accommodate fellows starting outside the usual cohort timelines — please note in your application if the September start date doesn't work for you.

Anthropic Fellows Program overview

The Anthropic Fellows Program is designed to foster AI research and engineering talent. We provide funding and mentorship to promising technical talent - regardless of previous experience.

Fellows will primarily use external infrastructure (e.g. open-source models, public APIs) to work on an empirical project aligned with our research priorities, with the goal of producing a public output (e.g. a paper submission). In one of our earlier cohorts, over 80% of fellows produced papers.

We run multiple cohorts of Fellows each year and review applications on a rolling basis. This application is for cohorts starting in July 2026 and beyond.

What to expect

Interview process

The interview process will include an initial application & reference check, technical assessments & interviews, and a research discussion.

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.

• 4 months of full-time research
• Direct mentorship from Anthropic researchers
• Access to a shared workspace (in either Berkeley, California or London, UK)
• Connection to the broader AI safety and security research community
• Weekly stipend of 3,850 USD / 2,310 GBP / 4,300 CAD + benefits (these vary by country)
• Funding for compute (~$15k/month) and other research expenses

The expected base stipend for this role is 3,850 USD / 2,310 GBP / 4,300 CAD per week, with an expectation of 40 hours per week for 4 months (with possible extension).

Fellows workstreams

Due to the success of the Anthropic Fellows for AI Safety Research program, we are now expanding it across teams at Anthropic. We expect there to be significant overlap in the types of skills and responsibilities across the roles and will by default consider candidates for all the workstreams.

Some of the workstreams may include unique assessment steps; we therefore ask you for workstream preferences in the application. You can see an overview of the current workstreams below:

• AI Safety Fellows
• AI Security Fellows
• ML Systems & Performance Fellows

• Are motivated by making sure AI is safe and beneficial for society as a whole
• Are excited to transition into empirical AI research and would be interested in a full-time role at Anthropic
• Have a strong technical background in computer science, mathematics, or physics
• Thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments
• Can implement ideas quickly and communicate clearly

• Strong background in a discipline relevant to a specific Fellows workstream (e.g. economics, social sciences, or cybersecurity)
• Experience in areas of research or engineering related to their workstream

AI Safety Fellows

Mentors, research areas, & past projects

Fellows will undergo a project selection & mentor matching process. Potential mentors include:

Note: You may research mentors' prior work, but all applications must go through the official form, not the mentors.

Our mentors will lead projects in select AI safety research areas, such as:

On our Alignment Science and Frontier Red Team blogs, you can read about past projects, including:

For a full list of representative projects for each area, please see these blog posts: Introducing the Anthropic Fellows Program for AI Safety Research, Recommendations for Technical AI Safety Research Directions.

Unique candidate criteria

• Fluent in Python programming
• Available to work full-time on the Fellows program
• Sam Bowman

AI Security Fellows

Mentors, research areas, & past projects

Fellows will undergo a project selection & mentor matching process. Potential mentors include:

On our Alignment Science and Frontier Red Team blogs, you can read about some past Fellows projects, including:

Unique candidate criteria

• Are motivated by reducing catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems
• Have experience with empirical ML research projects
• Have experience working with large language models
• Have experience in one of the research areas mentioned above

ML Systems & Performance Fellows

Mentors, research areas, & past projects

Fellows will undergo a project selection & mentor matching process. Potential mentors include:

• Are motivated by reducing catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems
• Have contributed to open-source projects in LLM- or security-adjacent repositories
• Have demonstrated success in bringing clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems
• Have experience with pentesting, vulnerability research, or other offensive security work

• AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits

Unique candidate criteria

• Building a CPU simulator for accelerator workloads
• Adding backends for different accelerators on an open source project
• Building on demand infrastructure for other infrastructure heavy fellows projects
• Building complex synthetic data or environment pipelines

Reinforcement Learning Fellows

Mentors, research areas, & past projects

Fellows will undergo a project selection & mentor matching process. Potential research areas and mentors include:

• Have strong software engineering skills with experience building complex ML systems
• Can balance research exploration with engineering rigor and operational reliability
• Enjoy collaborating across research and engineering disciplines
• Are comfortable working with large-scale distributed systems and high-performance computing (e.g. in trading)

Unique candidate criteria

• Building model-based tools to better understand AI training data and improve training data quality
• A research project to better understand generalization
• Creating RL environments to improve Claude models at capabilities that are within your domain of expertise
• Building RL environments for safety-related tasks
• Conducting research and implementing solutions in areas such as RL algorithms

The Anthropic Institute Fellows (Economics & Policy)

Mentors, research areas, & past projects

Fellows will undergo a project selection & mentor matching process. Potential research areas and mentors include:

• Have strong software engineering skills with experience building complex ML systems
• Can balance research exploration with engineering rigor and operational reliability
• Enjoy collaborating across research and engineering disciplines
• Are comfortable working with large-scale distributed systems and high-performance computing

• Designing and conducting empirical research on AI's economic effects, drawing on external data sources
• Developing new methodological approaches for studying AI's impact on labor markets, the future of work, and society
• Analysing the offense–defense balance for AI-enabled cyber and bio capabilities as models scale
• Measuring the extent to which model performance increases with custom harnesses?
• Identifying market driven mechanisms that could improve societal resilience to anticipated threats from AI systems?

Unique candidate criteria

• How AI Impacts Skill Formation: Judy Shen and Alex Tamkin
• Stress-Testing Model Specs Reveals Character Differences among Language Models: Jifan Zhang, Henry Sleight, Andi Peng, John Schulman, and Esin Durmus

Logistics

Logistics Requirements: To participate in the Fellows program, you must have work authorization in the US, UK, or Canada and be located in that country during the program.

Workspace Locations: We have designated shared workspaces in London and Berkeley where fellows will work from and mentors will visit. We are also open to remote fellows in the UK, US, or Canada. We will ask you about your availability to work from Berkeley or London (full- or part-time) during the program.

Visa Sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for fellows. To participate in the Fellows program, you need to have or independently obtain full-time work authorization in the UK, the US, or Canada.

Program Duration: The program runs for 4 months, full-time. If you can't commit to the full duration, please still apply and note your constraints in the application. We review these requests on a case-by-case basis.

Please note: We do not guarantee that we will make any full-time offers to fellows. However, strong performance during the program may indicate that a Fellow would be a good fit for full-time roles at Anthropic. In previous cohorts, 25-50% of fellows received a full-time offer, and we’ve supported many more to go on to do great work on AI safety and security at other organizations.

Applications and interviews are managed by Constellation, our recruiting partner. Clicking "Apply here" will take you to their portal, and updates will come from a Constellation address. Constellation also runs the Berkeley workspace and provides program support for fellows working on AI safety and security; fellows on capabilities-focused projects are supported directly by Anthropic. All applicants currently use the same application portal but we are working to separate applications for safety/security and capabilities focused projects in future rounds.

Apply here

The below are Anthropic's policies for full time roles. These do NOT apply to the Fellows Program. Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience