IP Counsel, Patents

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

We are seeking an experienced and strategic IP Counsel to join our growing legal team. In this role, you will provide comprehensive IP guidance across the organization, with particular depth in patent strategy. You will work closely with our product, research, and technical teams to help support Anthropic's organic patent portfolio development while also advising on the full spectrum of IP matters. You will partner closely with the Head of IP and other IP legal colleagues to help design and implement an IP program that protects Anthropic's innovations, supports the company's growth, and is aligned with the company’s mission.

Responsibilities

• Support and contribute to our organic patent development process, including invention harvesting, drafting oversight, prosecution management, and coordination with outside counsel
• Partner in developing and implementing comprehensive patent strategies in the U.S. and internationally that align with Anthropic's business objectives and technology roadmap
• Provide broad IP guidance across the organization, with the ability to identify and address potential IP issues across patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and open source
• Support analysis and response to third-party patent demands, and evaluate strategic patent acquisition and licensing opportunities
• Conduct IP due diligence for M&A transactions and strategic partnerships
• Advise on IP aspects of commercial agreements, including licenses, joint development agreements, and technology transfers, educating technical teams on best practices to protect Anthropic's innovations

Minimum qualifications

• Hold a JD and are an active member of at least one U.S. state bar
• Are registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
• Have substantial patent experience, including invention harvesting, prosecution, and portfolio development, along with working knowledge of the broader IP spectrum, including trademarks, trade secrets, and open source
• Have worked directly with engineers, researchers, or product teams to identify and protect inventions, and can explain IP concepts clearly to people who aren't lawyers
• Have contributed to and helped implement IP strategies in a rapidly evolving technical environments
• Experience balancing legal protection with business practicality in a collaborative setting

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years of legal experience with demonstrated expertise across the IP spectrum particularly in patents
• Active membership in the California bar
• Advanced degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field
• Deep expertise in one or more IP areas beyond patents
• Experience with AI, machine learning, or related cutting-edge technologies
• Experience analyzing and responding to third-party patent assertions, or evaluating patent acquisitions and licensing transactions
• Experience practicing in-house at a technology company, or otherwise supporting technology clients through periods of rapid growth

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.

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.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.