Anthropic physics / physics-adjacent people map

Date: 2026-05-19

Executive summary

• Siddharth Mishra-Sharma is the clearest public hit: he is explicitly presented by Anthropic as a Discovery-team researcher working on scientific computing, and his example is directly physics-native (a differentiable cosmological Boltzmann solver for CMB / early-universe modeling).
• Jared Kaplan is highly relevant by background and influence, but the public evidence I found points more to senior frontier-model / science leadership than to hands-on current physics application work.
• Brianna Chrisman looks real and important, but mainly for biology / bioinformatics / scientific reasoning evals, not for physics specifically.
• Public person-level attribution is thin. The evidence supports a real internal science push at Anthropic, but not a large publicly named bench of physics operators.
• Bottom line: if the question is “who at Anthropic most plausibly matters for hard-tech / physics-oriented AI work?”, the shortlist is Siddharth first, Jared second, Brianna third if the aperture includes scientific reasoning/evals beyond physics.

Method

• Used public Anthropic pages first: Science blog, research posts, and science-related news/program pages.
• Cross-checked named people against public bios / scholar-like pages / lab pages / LinkedIn-like snippets.
• Weighted evidence by:

1. explicit Anthropic attribution,

2. specificity of current work,

3. closeness to physics or hard-science workflows.

• Penalized weak snippet-only matches and did not pad the list.

Candidate table

Name	Current Anthropic role signal	Physics/science pedigree	Evidence of current work	Relevance to Had	Confidence
**Siddharth Mishra-Sharma**	Explicitly named on Anthropic Discovery team; personal site says Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic working on Claude’s scientific capabilities	PhD in theoretical physics (Princeton); postdoc in cosmology / particle physics; IAIFI fellow at MIT/Harvard	Anthropic science post centers on using Claude for scientific computing, with a concrete cosmology example: implementing a differentiable Boltzmann solver in JAX for CMB / early-universe modeling	**Highest** — direct overlap with physics, scientific computing, and AI-for-science	**High**
**Jared Kaplan**	Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Anthropic	Strong theoretical physics pedigree; PhD in physics (Harvard); BA in physics + math (Stanford)	Public evidence in hand points mainly to scaling laws / core frontier-model / Constitutional AI leadership rather than direct current physics-application work	High strategic relevance, but weaker as an operator-level physics target	**Medium**
**Brianna Chrisman**	Anthropic science materials identify “Brianna” on the Discovery team leading BioMysteryBench work; public signals strongly suggest Brianna Chrisman	ML-biology / genomics / bioinformatics profile; Yale background in bioengineering and applied physics	BioMysteryBench: evaluating Claude on bioinformatics research tasks, agentic scientific workflows, and tool use	Strong if Had cares about scientific reasoning/evals more broadly; less direct for physics-specific outreach	**Medium** for this use case
**Hongbin Chen**	Scholar / profile snippets indicate Anthropic affiliation	Theoretical physics + ML snippet-level pedigree	I found no clear Anthropic public evidence tying him to a current physics/science workstream	Low current targeting value	**Low**
**Nova DasSarma**	Public snippets indicate Systems Lead at Anthropic	AI / bioinformatics-adjacent background	Available evidence points to infrastructure / systems leadership, not direct science-research execution	Low for physics-oriented targeting	**Low–Medium**

Likely clusters / workstreams

1) Direct physics / scientific computing

• Siddharth Mishra-Sharma is the only high-confidence public match.
• This looks like genuine AI-for-physics / scientific-computing work, not just a physics degree attached to generic model work.

2) Scientific reasoning / evals

• Brianna Chrisman appears to sit here.
• The signal is strongest around benchmarks, tool use, and agentic research workflows, but in biology rather than physical science.

3) Hard-science leadership / strategy adjacency

• Jared Kaplan fits here.
• He likely matters if the goal is understanding Anthropic’s science posture or top-level sponsorship, but public evidence does not show him as the hands-on physics operator.

4) Weak / unvalidated matches

• Hongbin Chen and Nova DasSarma remain weak for this specific search.
• I would not spend intro capital here without fresh private signal.

Top names most relevant to Had

1. Siddharth Mishra-Sharma — best direct fit for physics-oriented AI work.

2. Jared Kaplan — strong strategic / senior relevance, especially if the goal is sponsor-level context rather than day-to-day technical collaboration.

3. Brianna Chrisman — best adjacent name if the relevant thread is scientific reasoning, tool use, and research evals rather than physics per se.

Open unknowns / what would need warm-intro validation

• Whether Siddharth is currently owning externally relevant physics/scientific-computing efforts vs mostly internal capability R&D.
• Whether Jared is the right person for a direct conversation, or better treated as a senior umbrella node above more specific operators.
• Whether Brianna’s remit extends beyond biology into broader physical-science reasoning/evals.
• Whether Anthropic has additional physics-native researchers whose work is simply not publicly attributed yet.

Source notes

• Anthropic science post: https://www.anthropic.com/research/long-running-Claude
• Anthropic science intro: https://www.anthropic.com/research/introducing-anthropic-science
• Anthropic BioMysteryBench post: https://www.anthropic.com/research/Evaluating-Claude-For-Bioinformatics-With-BioMysteryBench
• Anthropic science hub: https://www.anthropic.com/science
• Siddharth site: https://smsharma.io/
• BU profile: https://www.bu.edu/cds-faculty/profile/siddharth-mishra-sharma/
• Jared bio: https://www.hertzfoundation.org/people/jared-kaplan/
• Brianna Wall Lab page: https://wall-lab.stanford.edu/people/alumni/brianna/