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Can you lay out exactly what you'd expect them to be doing if they thought AI was imminent? I don't really think they'd be bothering worrying about pinching the salary of 30 employees if they thought ai was imminent. I also don't think in house lawyers really scales the way you're implying. 30 lawyers gives you what? 3 teams of lawyers? You're doing a lot of lobbying because you're a major player in new tech so one of those teams is your lobbying arm, one is working on corporate mergers and acquisitions(I'm sure they're trying to buy some kind of image model team), and one is probably cooking up stuff on what they're liable for/keep the lights on legal work. It's just not the kind of thing you scale linearly with employees.
I'm not saying they have too many lawyers. I'm saying that if their products were as good as they claim they are, they'd be able to make do with fewer lawyers. They claim 88% of legal tasks can be automated, and legal employees are among the most expensive. What kind of advertising is that? You can use our software to automate your legal work and save! Except we have more lawyers on the payroll than the industry average, and when litigating we hire white shoe firms whose lawyers are of the type who have their secretaries print things out for them. If the technology isn't saving Anthropic any money then why should we believe it will save anyone else money?
You can cite all the reasons why you think Anthropic needs a bigger legal department, and maybe they do, but keep in mind that there are other companies that have other unique issues that Anthropic doesn't have to deal with. For instance, they don't get sued all that often. I represent a subsidiary of a global machinery company based in Japan that got sued a dozen times last month. For one thing. In one jurisdiction. They're getting sued somewhere, for something, multiple times per day. The US arm of the parent company, whom you've certainly heard of, has five people in its in-house legal department. To be fair to Anthropic, once a company starts getting sued constantly they usually hire national coordinating counsel to manage their litigation for them, but they still have to prepare assignments to local counsel and accept service, and do all the other boring things that come with the territory, as well as monitor the litigation and grant settlement authority.
Anyway, of the six openings they're advertising, two deal with vendor contracts, one with datacenter construction, one with customer contracts, one with international compliance and one with "frontier" issues, i.e. problems that don't exist yet and don't have clear answers. M&A and lobbying are the kinds of things that get contracted out and that the in-house team doesn't do much hands-on work with. It's more like the counsel would occasionally meet with/provide reports to a senior member of the legal team, maybe a junior member occasionally supervising it, but not something anyone is doing full time.
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