Conceptual Reasoning Fellow

Program Overview

Anthropic's Conceptual Reasoning Fellow program is a four-month opportunity for researchers and experts from philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy, and law to work with Anthropic's research teams. Fellows will pair their deep domain expertise with Anthropic's 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:

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

Key Responsibilities:

• Identify key open problems in your field, assess approaches to solving them, and use Claude to make progress on them.
• Identify grand societal challenges which the expertise of your field is crucial for addressing, and assess Claude's strengths and weaknesses in tackling them.
• Design 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.
• Team 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:

• Excitement 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.
• 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 will be made by November 20th.
• A one-week in-person orientation in San Francisco is required.
• The default location is in San Francisco. Remote engagements within the United States may be considered in certain circumstances.
• This is a fixed-term contract position.