Anthropic Fellows Program, Reinforcement Learning
About the role
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).
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
- 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
Interview process
The interview process will include an initial application & reference check, technical assessments & interviews, and a research discussion.
Compensation
- 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
- AI Safety Fellows
- AI Security Fellows
- ML Systems & Performance Fellows
- Reinforcement Learning Fellows
- Economics & Societal Impacts Fellows
Reinforcement Learning Fellows
- Mentors, research areas, & past projects
- Potential research areas and mentors include:
- Ruhua Jiang
- Kaidi Cao
- Sunny Duan
- David Brandfonbrener
- Colt Steele
- Dino Distefano
- Will Williams
- Projects in this workstream may include:
- 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
- Unique candidate criteria
- You might be a particularly great fit for this workstream if you:
- 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
- Have experience with training, fine-tuning, or evaluating large language models
- Are adept at analyzing and debugging model training processes
- 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.
- 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.
Logistics
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.
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.
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