Anthropic opens high-paying positions for AI-assisted chip design research

Anthropic is expanding its internal chip design team and plans to develop its first custom ASIC. Research engineer positions focused on reinforcement learning to teach Claude chip design tasks (RTL code generation, verification, physical layout optimization) offer annual salaries between $500,000 and $850,000, significantly higher than silicon engineer roles responsible for actual chip design, which pay between $320,000 and $485,000. Both positions require deep expertise in ASIC flows, RTL, formal verification, and EDA tools, creating what experts describe as "salary inversion". The initiative reflects the industry trend of using AI to accelerate chip engineering, following earlier developments like the Kimi K3 model.