Commercial Counsel, Infrastructure Security

About the role

Anthropic’s model weights and training infrastructure are among the highest-value targets in the technology sector, facing nation-state, supply-chain interdiction, and insider threats that conventional enterprise security programs were not built to address. As Commercial Counsel, Infrastructure Security for Compute and Infrastructure at Anthropic, you’ll be the day-to-day legal partner to the Chief Security Officer’s infrastructure-security and the Governance, Risk and Compliance teams. You will own the contractual and regulatory layer of physical and facility security, hardware and supply-chain security, network security, vendor personnel and insider-risk flow-downs, and security regulatory and assurance.

You’ll work in close partnership with Anthropic teammates in Frontier, Product, Litigation, Employment, and Commercial Legal, in addition to specialized outside counsel. You will serve as the primary legal owner ensuring security requirements are in the contract before signature and that external work product aligns with Anthropic’s security posture and commercial objectives.

Responsibilities:

• Draft and negotiate security design-basis and site-hardening specifications in build-to-suit, lease, and colo agreements (perimeter, access control, CCTV, intrusion detection); guard-force statements of work, post orders, and KPI regimes; visitor, contractor, and badging policy; and security clauses in shared-campus and multi-tenant arrangements

• Own provenance, anti-tamper, and chain-of-custody warranties in silicon, ODM, and OEM paper; trusted-supplier and country-of-origin restrictions; NDAA §889/§5949 and CHIPS-Act guardrail flow-downs; BIS/EAR advanced-computing and semiconductor export-control flow-downs and end-use/end-user certifications; firmware integrity, secure-boot, and golden-image escrow terms; secure logistics; counterfeit-part and grey-market controls; and secure decommissioning and certified media-destruction terms

• Draft security schedules in carrier and fiber agreements (encryption-in-transit, route integrity, lawful-intercept handling), and security obligations in peering agreements

• Set background-screening, training, and badge-revocation requirements for vendor and contractor personnel with site or hardware access, and flow Anthropic personnel-security standards into guard-force, security-integrator, and EPC vendor MSAs

• Support CFIUS and outbound-investment screening on infrastructure vendors and sites, provide NIST/ISO/SOC 2 physical-control evidence for customer and auditor assurance in partnership with security teams; and support security representations in customer contracts that reference physical infrastructure with Commercial Legal

• Work closely with specialized outside counsel, ensuring their work product aligns with Anthropic’s security and commercial objectives

• Build the function: develop and maintain the security-schedule library, design-basis templates, advise on vendor security questionnaire templates, and negotiation playbooks; train Procurement, Datacenter, and Network teams to apply them at scale

• Serve as direct counsel to the CSO’s infrastructure-security organization, coordinating with Product Legal and Litigation on incident response, threat intelligence, law-enforcement and intelligence-community engagement, insider-threat governance, and model-weight security policy under Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy

• Escalate novel structures or terms that create downstream risk for Anthropic’s security posture or operational flexibility; ensure security requirements accommodate AI-specific threats including hardware tamper, supply-chain interdiction, and high-value-target facility risk

• Monitor and assess the evolving regulatory landscape affecting security and data protection, identifying higher-risk obligations for the business and partnering with security to operationalize them through policies, controls, and compliance programs

• Advise on risk assessments, risk acceptance decisions, and reporting to leadership and the board; and review remediation commitments arising from assessments, customer audits and regulator inquiries. 

Minimum qualifications:

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

• Fluency in security design-basis specifications, guard-force and access-control contracting, and how security schedules interact with build-to-suit, colo, procurement, and carrier agreements

• Experience with NDAA §889/§5949, CHIPS-Act guardrails, CFIUS/outbound-investment screening, and trusted-supplier or country-of-origin programs

• Comfort with NIST, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 physical-control frameworks and the evidence and attestation process that supports customer and auditor assurance

• Ability to coordinate effectively with multiple internal legal teams, and specialized outside counsel while maintaining strategic direction 

• Strong judgment about when contractual security terms create downstream risk for Anthropic’s security posture, audit position, or operational flexibility

• Effective collaboration skills for working with the CSO’s organization, procurement, datacenter, and network teams

• Communication skills that translate security and supply-chain-integrity concepts into clear risk assessments for business stakeholders

• Genuine interest in infrastructure security and appreciation for why physical, hardware, and network security is mission-critical for frontier AI

Preferred qualifications:

• At least 10-12 years of relevant legal experience with meaningful exposure to physical and facility security contracting, hardware and supply-chain security, network security schedules, or security regulatory and assurance work for critical infrastructure

• In-house experience at cloud service providers, hyperscalers, defense and aerospace primes, telecom carriers, utilities, semiconductor companies, or datacenter operators supporting physical-security, supply-chain-security, or security-assurance programs; or U.S. government experience at DoD, DHS/CISA, BIS, or CFIUS staff

• Experience at large technology companies with first-party datacenter or hardware programs supporting security contracting from the buy side

• Law firm experience at practices with national-security, supply-chain, or critical-infrastructure specialization, particularly those who have worked on NDAA §889, CFIUS, or trusted-supplier matters

• Prior involvement in transactions requiring sophisticated understanding of secure logistics, chain-of-custody, firmware integrity, and certified media destruction

• Familiarity with CCTV/biometrics privacy regimes, executive-protection contracting, and the contractual layer of insider-risk programs

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance 

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect staff to be able to work from our San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., 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.