Tabletop Exercise Lead, The Anthropic Institute

San Francisco · USD 295,000-295,000 / year · 10+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 17, 2026

At a glance

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.

You will build and lead the Institute’s tabletop exercise program and the team that runs it.
Based on trends visible in the exponential and in consultation with technical experts, you will set the research agenda: which questions the exercises should answer, which scenarios to run, with which audiences, and what each run is meant to test.

Set the program’s research agenda: the questions exercises should answer, the scenarios to run, and the audience for each
Design exercises as empirical studies: define what each run tests, standardize scenarios and data capture so results are comparable, and use repeated play to map the range of outcomes
Build the program’s measurement: pre- and post-exercise assessments, decision logs, transcript analysis and after-action reports
Turn results into findings: publish on what the exercises show, and brief senior people inside and outside Anthropic on the gaps they expose
Hire, manage and develop a team and a bench of facilitators
Make the program scalable: maintain a library of tested scenarios that the team reuses most of the time, refreshed on a regular cadence so they stay timely
Build a facilitator kit ("TTX in a box") so other internal teams or external partners can run exercises to the same standard
Create and direct the tools behind the exercises, including Claude-driven simulations that generate a live outside-world feed during play

Have designed and run tabletop exercises, wargames, or simulations for senior decision-makers and published on the subject
Have training in a discipline that uses simulation, experimental methods or structured analysis
Have 10+ years of experience in national security, government, technology policy, or strategy
Can keep the scenarios technically grounded with a strong grasp of AI capabilities and safety research
Have managed a team, including hiring, setting direction, giving feedback and developing people
Use Claude and other AI tools extensively in your own work
Care about AI safety and Anthropic's public benefit mission
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

Published research on wargaming methods, simulation or crisis decision-making
Run exercises that fed into real policy or crisis-response decisions
Run multi-iteration or experimental wargames and analyzed results across runs
Used AI agents or language models as players, adjudicators or analysts in simulations
Led a research program or team through a period of growth
Existing relationships across national security, government, policy and AI, and are trusted in those communities
Published widely read work on AI, emerging technology, strategy or crisis decision-making

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.