Anthropic Phone Screen Experience [5 YOE]
January 27, 2026 · 24 reads
Summary
I interviewed for an ML infrastructure role at Anthropic, which included a recruiter call focused on AI safety and a phone screen with a web crawler problem and a multithreading follow-up. Despite feeling confident in my performance, I was unfortunately rejected shortly after the phone screen.
Full Experience
Recruiter Call
The call was fairly standard, with the caveat of asking about AI safety. Make sure you develop a strong opinion on AI safety before going into the interview. I believe having a view that is simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic is ideal as the whole company revolves around AI safety as a mission statement - while doing AIPhone Screen
The question is this one (your standard web crawler). https://leetcode.com/problems/web-crawler/description/Fairly standard with a BFS solution, but the follow up was multithreading which required the use of thread pool executors and asyncio. I answered all the questions properly, passed all test cases - but I think the interviewer was somewhat biased towards me.
The result was a rejection shortly after in a few days even though I was sure I could've moved to the onsite.
Interview Questions (1)
1.
Web Crawler with Multithreading Follow-up
Data Structures & Algorithms·Medium
Implement a web crawler. This is a standard problem, typically solvable with BFS. The follow-up involved multithreading, requiring the use of thread pool executors and asyncio.