Tabletop Exercise Lead, The Anthropic Institute

Anthropic•San Francisco, CA

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Tabletop Exercise Lead will build and lead The Anthropic Institute’s tabletop exercise program and the team that runs it. The role sets the research agenda based on emerging trends and consultation with technical experts, determining which questions and scenarios exercises should address, which audiences should participate, and what each run is intended to test. The lead owns methods that make results comparable across runs and turn them into findings useful to people outside the exercise room. The role includes hiring and managing a team and a bench of facilitators, serving as the program’s public voice, and making the program scalable through a reusable, regularly refreshed scenario library and a facilitator kit that enables internal teams or external partners to run exercises to a consistent standard. The lead also creates and directs exercise tools, including Claude-driven simulations that generate a live outside-world feed during play. Tabletop exercises are used to help decision-makers practice responding to uncertain situations before they occur, and to reveal what tools and information participants use or need. Repeated exercises with different groups, including AI agents in simulations, can provide empirical evidence about the range of decisions people and institutions may make in future situations.

Requirements

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.
Be able to keep 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.
Have a bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
Have a field of study relevant to the role, demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice To Haves

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.
Have existing relationships across national security, government, policy, and AI, and be trusted in those communities.
Published widely read work on AI, emerging technology, strategy, or crisis decision-making.

Responsibilities

Set the program’s research agenda, including the questions exercises should answer, the scenarios to run, and the audience for each.
Design exercises as empirical studies by defining what each run tests and standardizing scenarios and data capture so results are comparable.
Use repeated play to map the range of outcomes.
Build the program’s measurement methods, including pre- and post-exercise assessments, decision logs, transcript analysis, and after-action reports.
Publish findings about what 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 by maintaining a library of tested, reusable scenarios and refreshing it regularly.
Build a facilitator kit (“TTX in a box”) so internal teams or external partners can run exercises to the same standard.
Create and direct tools behind the exercises, including Claude-driven simulations that generate a live outside-world feed during play.
Serve as the program’s public voice.