Tabletop Exercise Lead, The Anthropic Institute

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. You will own the methods that make results comparable across runs and turn them into findings people outside the room can use. You will hire and manage a team plus a bench of facilitators, and you will be the program’s public voice.

If RSI arrives, the hardest problems will be about making decisions under uncertainty. A tabletop exercise (TTX) allows the people who would face that situation practice it before it is real. It also shows us what tools and information they reach for, including what they would need that does not exist yet. Tabletop exercises are also a research method. You can run the same scenario many times, with different groups of people (and with many more AI agents playing in silico), and you start to see the distribution of decisions people make. This is one of the few ways to generate empirical evidence about the future.

• 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

• 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

Annual Salary: $295,000—$295,000 USD. Anthropic offers 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.

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