Anthropic's stated mission is to ensure that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI, and the company is explicit that safety is not a feature bolted onto the product but the reason the organization exists. For an engineer, mission alignment shows up as a willingness to weigh safety, reliability, and potential for harm as first-class considerations in real decisions - to slow down, add a mitigation, or escalate a concern even when it costs velocity - and to do so with calibrated judgment rather than reflexive caution. The hard part the interview probes is exactly that calibration: safety maximalism that blocks everything is as unhelpful as shipping-at-all-costs. The company wants people who can hold both the urgency of building and the seriousness of getting it right, and reason about the trade honestly. In behavioral rounds, interviewers look for whether you actually reason about consequences and act on that reasoning, not just profess concern. The strong signal is a story where you identified a real risk or harm (not a hypothetical), weighed it against the cost of addressing it, and made a judgment call you can defend on the merits - including cases where you decided the risk was acceptable and shipped, or where you slowed down and it was worth it. Genuine curiosity about the mission and honesty about trade-offs read as alignment. The anti-signals are performative safety (invoking it as a slogan with no real trade behind it), zealotry that ignores cost entirely, and a total absence of consequence-reasoning in stories where it clearly applied.