Commercial Counsel, Compute & Infrastructure

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

As a Commercial Counsel for Compute & Infrastructure at Anthropic, you’ll lead legal strategy for the technical foundation that enables frontier AI research and deployment. You’ll serve as a senior legal partner to Anthropic’s compute and compute finance teams, negotiating and managing Anthropic’s most financially significant and strategically sensitive relationships. You will support our hyperscaler and neocloud relationships, as well as Anthropic’s growing datacenter footprint and related infrastructure; essential components to Anthropic’s place on the frontier of AI model development.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end legal strategy and execution for Anthropic’s compute and infrastructure portfolio, including hyperscaler relationships (AWS, GCP, Azure), accelerator procurement (GPU, TPU, Trainium), neocloud capacity arrangements, datacenter capacity, and datacenter/real estate transactions

• Strategic advisor on the most complex compute-related transactions and partnerships occurring at the company

• Negotiate and manage Anthropic's largest financial commitments, including multi-billion-dollar infrastructure deals with complex technical, commercial, and strategic implications

• Direct and manage outside counsel and internal deal teams

• Support our compute deal frameworks and playbooks for recurring transaction types that enable velocity while maintaining appropriate risk controls

• Collaborate cross-functionally with compute business teams, finance, corporate development, product, and research to structure deals that optimize for both cost and strategic positioning

• Coordinate with other strategic commercial transactions workstreams (e.g., partnerships, and strategic pursuits) to manage interdependencies, cross-team obligations, and opportunities; monitor and advise on tariff and export control regulations, supply allocation dynamics, and emerging regulatory frameworks

You might be a good fit if you have:

• JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar

• At least 10-12 years of relevant legal experience, with substantial focus on complex infrastructure, technology procurement, or large-scale commercial transactions; you thrive when supporting bespoke “one of” deals ($ hundreds of millions or billions)

• Demonstrated a track record of leading sophisticated, high-stakes negotiations involving technical complexity, novel commercial structures, and strategic sensitivity

• Cross-function deal team management experience, including developing, and retaining legal talent

• Exceptional ability to understand and negotiate technical terms related to compute infrastructure, hardware specifications, data center operations, and cloud services; you should be comfortable discussing accelerator chips, compute clusters, power requirements, and network topology with technical stakeholders

• Superior judgment in risk assessment for transactions where Anthropic's strategic positioning and sustained position on the AI frontier depend on favorable outcomes

• Outstanding ability to manage and direct external counsel on specialized matters, ensuring external teams deliver excellent work product while integrating seamlessly

• Strong business understanding of compute infrastructure dynamics, including economics / expenditure models, revenue sharing arrangements, compute cost optimization, and AI accelerator market dynamics (supply constraints / customer allocations, emerging financing structures / backstops)

• Exceptional communication skills with ability to translate complex technical and financial concepts into strategic business considerations for executives and board members

• Genuine intellectual curiosity about AI infrastructure and commitment to supporting Anthropic's mission to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems

• Comfort with high-stakes, fast-moving environments where deals must close on compressed timelines to secure critical capacity

Strong candidates may have:

• Direct experience with extremely bespoke or collaborative hyperscaler relationships (AWS, GCP, Azure) from either the customer side (negotiating enterprise cloud agreements) or provider side (working in-house at a major cloud provider)

• Background in technology infrastructure, data center operations,hardware / semiconductor transactions, or working with or at emerging neocloud providers

• Experience with complex payment and revenue stream arrangements, profit participation structures, or joint venture agreements involving infrastructure assets

• Prior involvement in transactions requiring sophisticated understanding of technical specifications, long-term service commitments, and operational requirements

• Familiarity with real estate and construction agreements for mission-critical facilities (data centers, manufacturing facilities, research labs)

• Experience negotiating with Fortune 100 technology companies and managing long-term strategic supplier relationships

• Track record of closing deals on compressed timelines when competitive dynamics or business urgency demand rapid execution

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect staff to be able to work from our San Francisco or New York office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.

Annual Salary:
$320,000—$385,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.

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