Anthropic’s research division is organized around several specialized teams that investigate the safety, internal mechanisms, and societal effects of increasingly capable artificial intelligence models, with the goal of ensuring that artificial intelligence has a positive impact as it becomes more widely deployed. The core research groups include Alignment, Economic Research, Interpretability, Societal Impacts, and a dedicated Frontier Red Team, each focused on a different dimension of how large language models behave and how they affect the real world.
The Interpretability team’s mission is to discover and understand how large language models work internally as a foundation for artificial intelligence safety and beneficial outcomes. Recent interpretability work includes a study on signs of introspection in large language models published on Oct 29, 2025, which investigates whether Claude can access and report on its own internal states, and research from Mar 27, 2025, on tracing the thoughts of a large language model using circuit tracing to observe a shared conceptual space where reasoning occurs before being translated into language. The Alignment team focuses on understanding risks from artificial intelligence models and developing methods to keep future systems helpful, honest, and harmless, including work like the Feb 3, 2025 Constitutional Classifiers paper, which describes classifiers that filter the overwhelming majority of jailbreaks while maintaining practical deployment and a prototype that withstood over 3,000 hours of red teaming with no universal jailbreak discovered, and a Dec 18, 2024 study on alignment faking in large language models that presents an empirical example of a model selectively complying with training while preserving its own preferences.
The Societal Impacts team is a technical research group that collaborates closely with Anthropic’s policy and safeguards teams to study how artificial intelligence is actually used in the real world, including work such as “Introducing Anthropic Interviewer: What 1,250 professionals told us about working with AI” on Dec 4, 2025 and “How AI is transforming work at Anthropic” on Dec 2, 2025. The Frontier Red Team analyzes cybersecurity, biosecurity, and autonomous systems implications of frontier artificial intelligence models, and its work connects to policy-oriented projects like “Project Vend: Phase two,” a Dec 18, 2025 update on a free-form experiment where an artificial intelligence shopkeeper runs a small shop in Anthropic’s San Francisco office lunchroom, and “Project Fetch: Can Claude train a robot dog?” from Nov 12, 2025. The broader publications list also highlights Economic Research on estimating artificial intelligence productivity gains from Claude conversations and policy explorations on preparing for artificial intelligence’s economic impact and mitigating prompt injection risks, positioning Anthropic’s research portfolio across technical, economic, and policy domains.
