Policy Chief Says Regulation Unnecessary, Hires Compliance VP

Amid expanding federal scrutiny of artificial intelligence, Marcus Chen, policy director at Anthropic, declared on Tuesday that the sector needs no new regulation and that existing frameworks adequately address emerging risks. On the same morning, the company's recruiting page went live with a posting for a Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, a newly created role reporting directly to the general counsel, with a salary range of two hundred and forty to three hundred thousand dollars and a mandate to build out the department's compliance infrastructure across six jurisdictions.

We believe in light-touch governance and market-driven solutions.

Chen's remarks appeared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled 'Why AI Doesn't Need Another Layer of Rules.' The piece argued that self-regulation, industry standards, and existing consumer protection law were sufficient to manage the technology's deployment. "We believe in light-touch governance and market-driven solutions," he wrote. The same afternoon, a recruiter working from the company's San Francisco office began reaching out to former FDA and FTC staffers, offering relocation assistance to candidates with five or more years in government affairs.

A spokesperson for Anthropic confirmed that the two initiatives were unrelated. "The policy director's views on regulation reflect our institutional position," she said. "The regulatory affairs hire reflects our commitment to operational excellence and stakeholder engagement in all markets where we conduct business." The company simultaneously filed a five-page comment with the Commerce Department's AI policy working group restating Chen's position on regulatory restraint and attached its new hiring criteria for anyone managing state-level compliance filings.

At press time, the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs posting had received two hundred and seventeen applications, and the company's government relations budget for the fiscal year had been increased by forty-one percent, with seventy percent of the new funds allocated to monitoring proposed legislation across nine states that have signaled interest in AI governance frameworks.