Commercial Counsel, Networking & Datacenter Operations

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 Commercial Counsel, Networking & Datacenter Operations for Compute and Infrastructure at Anthropic, you’ll lead legal execution for the connective tissue and the steady-state running of Anthropic’s Infrastructure. This role spans dark fiber and IRU agreements, IP transit and peering, subsea-cable capacity, network-equipment procurement, and the Operations & Maintenance (O&M), facilities-management, commissioning, decommissioning, and resilience contracting that keeps production sites online once the keys are handed over.

You’ll work in close partnership with Anthropic teammates in Datacenter Legal, Strategic Technology & Procurement, Infrastructure Security, Treasury/Risk and Public Policy, in addition to specialized outside counsel. You will serve as the primary legal owner ensuring external work product aligns with Anthropic’s commercial objectives and integrates with our overall compute and availability strategy.

Responsibilities:

• Negotiate dark fiber and IRU agreements (long-haul and metro), wavelength and lit-capacity services, IP transit and peering (settlement-free and paid), internet-exchange participation, subsea-cable capacity and landing-party agreements, carrier-hotel and meet-me-room agreements, and cross-connect MSAs

• Support the telecom regulatory interface, including FCC Section 214 authorizations, submarine-cable landing licenses and Team Telecom (EO 13913 Committee) review, the FCC’s 2025 subsea-cable security and IRU rules, private-carrier status determinations, and rights-of-way, franchise, and pole-attachment where Anthropic builds first-party fiber — working in close coordination with Infrastructure Security Legal on the national-security overlay for subsea capacity and landing-party participation

• Structure and negotiate O&M and integrated-facilities-management contracts, critical-spares and break-fix agreements, smart-hands SLAs with colo landlords, and disaster recovery and resilience contracting

• Own asset disposition, decommissioning, and media-sanitization terms, and data-hall fit-out and tenant-improvement work, in coordination with Infrastructure Security and Datacenter Legal

• Support property, builder’s-risk, business-interruption, and equipment-breakdown insurance placement with Treasury/Risk, and coordinate with Infrastructure Security Legal on guard-force, vendor-personnel, and physical-security flow-downs in O&M and facilities-management contracts

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

• Build and own the network and O&M contract template library, SLA-credit playbooks, and intake and approval workflows so Network and Site-Ops teams can self-serve standard transactions; train Procurement and operations partners to apply them at scale

• Manage SLA-credit claims, outage and root-cause-related disputes, warranty and break-fix claims, and pre-litigation vendor escalations, in coordination with Litigation

• Collaborate with the Compute team’s production-site and network-operations leads who handle operational execution, change management, and governance, providing legal and risk management expertise

• Understand how networking and operations legal structures interact with the compute capacity they support — availability SLAs, route diversity, and maintenance windows

• Escala