YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Clark

lines on the record
64
first
2026-05-31
most recent
2026-05-31
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Having a personal creative practice and hobby has been one of the best ways for me to both use AI in ways that kind of delight and excite and empower me, but also one of the best ways for me to feel calibrated about how good it is, because I have something I deeply understand, and occasionally now I'm like, oh, it finally wrote a good bit of dialogue for a story. Okay, you know, it's good to get calibrated. And I think it's just reminds you of the amazing excitement where, you know, in a very realistic sense, we have taught sand to think. bizarre bizarre stuff is a fur and i think being awake to that is is important as well”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I mean, I think that the sort of childlike wonder and curiosity I have a three-year-old that children have is remarkable. And it reminded me of when I had that as a child and how school methodically beat the curiosity out of me, as hard as it could. And the thing that AI gives you is a machine that is leveraged directly by one's intuition and curiosity and basically having areas of like huge passion and having curiosity about the world are things that are massively leveraged by AI technology and having rote skills or things like specific career plans or things which are almost disadvantaged by it. So I'm trying to teach my kid, I mean, you can't really teach a three-year-old anything, but in a few years, encouraging this culture of curiosity, encouraging obsession. Because the way that I've been most oriented to this technology is I have this passion project of writing newsletters and writing fiction within it and actually.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Getting people that work with us to say how they feel is good because it makes us accountable for it. Like I'm saying I'm scared and worried about this because it makes me even more accountable to solve that for everyone else as well.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Positive questions are okay, what are the exact regulations that you need to do? We had a productive one here where you were sort of pushing me and saying, well, that doesn't really cut it. What is actually necessary? I think it's useful to just get people to label specifics. I think it's also good to actually talk about feelings. This might be the fact I've lived in California for too long, but I now say stuff like this. But, you know, as someone working on this technology, Of course, I'm very excited by it and I work on it because fundamentally I think humanity has a huge range of challenges ahead of it this century and getting through them requires us to figure out smarter ways to generate power, various science breakthroughs, a huge range of medical treatments. AI can absolutely help us do that. I'm scared of it. I'm scared of the technology that I'm building and I'm scared of how it is governed less than like the toys I buy for my kids or the food I buy from the supermarket. It seems like an insane situation to me and I think actually”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Is a hugely good argument in investing in domestic compute infrastructure. The second part is with technologies that end up getting classified for military use or being deemed to be relevant to national security, there is always this tension of sovereignty and building and other things. And I have been saying to governments around the world since I started working in AI policy in 2016 or 17, you guys should build a big computer. We're building big computers and it's giving us like outrageous amounts of Is a choice. And the problem with this choice is that the numbers get more outrageous each year. So the best time to start it was last year, the second best time is now. A bad time is next year. And you see the picture. I think that has to be a part of this.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Let's do a deal. Yeah, I think this is not impossible scenario. It's a very worrying one. I think there's a couple of things that we need to work on. One is it's again hard to me to reconcile the shape of this future economy with, I guess, current ways that we try to tax or control corporations, especially AI corporations. The picture looks more to me like, well, these companies, including us, are going to have computers all over the world, but computers are going to be where lots of economic activity is taking place. There must be some way to more directly target that in terms of targeted forms of taxation. And I'm not a tax expert. I'm not claiming I have the answers. I'm just saying a basic intuition is that's where the thing changing your economy is. And it has a body and it's geographically distributed outside the US. Surely you can target that.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think that under something like RSI, the economy grows so much that it's like humans sit on top of an economy that's hundreds of times larger than the one today. You know, a lot of economic doctrine is that what you end up doing is you end up validating and verifying the outputs of automated processes. That's what happens in large chunks of the world around us and things like manufacturing and pricing risk and figuring out as people how you make agreements based on the risk of what you do, CV insurance markets, see things like bond markets, which essentially model risk of the country level. I think that there will be ample employment for people in new jobs and specialisms we can't imagine but sit on top of this much larger economy. But on roots of that, you're going to see like massive, massive changes in the structure of the economy and in jobs. But it's very hard to predict what those changes will be. I think you can just bet there will be massive changes with confidence.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Firms that are doing all of this new business generation if they proliferate in a much larger number than normal business formation.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “But we don't know what the shape of a future economy is. All I can tell you is I can't reconcile the capabilities of these systems with the economy staying as it is today. Like clearly massive changes will happen. Everyone but tries to predict this tends to be wrong in ways that a comedian can outrageous in the future. If you forced me to predict it, I'd say clearly you get productivity multipliers on things that AI touches. Clearly you get the emergence of new companies that are able to do a lot more with way fewer people relative to previous generation companies. And probably you are going to have some issue with early just out of school hiring because those are the people that have almost the least set of skills that are most replaceable by AI systems. Beyond that, it's very hard for me to say what the shape of a future economy with AI is because I don't know if the productivity multipliers compound and also create new industries. I don't know what the shape of whether these new”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So, the anthropic economic index looks at all of the ways that AI is being used by our customers in a privacy-preserving way, and it joins that with what are called ONET job classifications, which things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics use to classify changes happening in the economy. And what this allows you to do is look at the economic activity happening on the AI company platform and join it with the same economic data used to reason about the economy writ large. If we have any hope of being able to make strong claims about the impact of AI on the economy versus CEOs laying off people and saying it's due to AI, but rather it was due to COVID overhiring, which is a sin they commit, then we need to set up these kind of data sharing systems that absolutely can be done and is being done now. I'm in here in England just meeting with people with new AI and economics institute in the UK government, which aims to do just that.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Kannon should do on that. We're somewhat where we were with AI and national security a few years ago. There's an instinct that things are about to happen that are important. There is no real measurement or testing infrastructure built within government to do this. And the companies have only just begun, including with the Anthropic Index, to share information. But all of those are the ingredients from which you can build a telemetry system to basically tie to make causal claims of if AI company does X, Y happens in the economy. We absolutely have the ability to generate that data to do that across companies and government. It should be regulated that companies share information.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “What does the future looking back want? It wants you to have some kind of mandated safety testing thing which everyone has to do and everyone has to go through. And it wants you to have some notion of sharing details about these risks with society and it wants you to do something where society pre-positions to get advantages or deal with risks or to say no if the risks seem intolerable relative to the gain. All of these things have the shape of beginning to happen now and we as a company are in like vocal often support so vocal in fact that it's sometimes causes us issues with other parties in this space. And I believe that governments will ultimately act. It will just feel down to the wire because my sense and you two are experts in this that governments, it takes a lot to move them to action and it takes a lot of evidence before a crisis for them to do.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I disagree quite strongly. I think it is the ability and a choice of companies to do stuff beyond what is mandated by regulation. We do this already today where we commit to a range of safety testing of our own products and we publish it. And we say, we think that ultimately this should be what regulation should look like, but we can generate information ourselves. All of the frontier companies are people that care deeply about the safety of their systems. I mean, how could you not when you're building it? You don't get to stare directly into the heart of the ultimate cyber hacking machine and say, oh, well, this will be fine.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The story of all regulation has this property, but surely we can learn that the fact you say that is a reason for optimism, right?”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “We didn't proliferate bioweapons and we show up to court. Okay, like that's two wins, we'll take it. is at least a proof that you can do this basic form of coordination. It does require two to tanger. It requires there to be greater political will to do something tougher on regulation. We have a regime of transparency and transparency reporting right now, which is almost like, tell us about your manufacturing processes and details of the labels you've put on your AI systems. Clearly it'll go further. And in the same way we have aircraft, automotive and food testing for safety before you ship it to consumers, or I'm a recent dad. Lots of my kids' toys get tested effectively to make sure that when my kids inevitably eats it, it's not fully covered in the world.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I would say Let's just look at the general landscape, all of the frontier AI companies ended up doing bioweapon classifiers. All of them have ended up sharing lots of details of one another. Now, it's not been made mandatory, but I think that's almost beside the point because you can show that industry, like self-coordinated onto, hey, let's not randomly proliferate things like bioweapon risks into the evil.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “On earth you get, I think countries have the enlightened view that they're around for a long time, and there's an interest in reducing chaos. And I think industry has the incentives of we might be around for a very short time and we're in intense amounts of competition. So I agree with Rory, but actually I think it may be easier to...”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That there's a choice which is based on a spectrum between maximizing individual sovereignty and maximizing safety or what might critically be called paternalism, where maximal safety is no one gets access to it other than maybe just for government or like for safe organizations and maximum liberty is everyone gets access to it, we trust in the ability of people to like experiment with this. Now obviously both of these are ridiculous like positions like if basically no one gets access to it, you get essentially none of the benefits and you centralize power into like one or two entities or a small handful. If everyone gets access to it, you're now rolling like a whole bunch of loaded dice with the lives of people around the planet. There must be paths through this that look more like gradations of access”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “But you also don't want to have a regulation that prevents for nuclear power part because then you're going to be where the world found itself after overreacting to nuclear power issues in the 70s where we just stopped building it in large swaths of the world and lost out.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Advancing science, advancing our ability to push forward healthcare. And also, it turns out that as you make from better at this, dual-use capabilities are now showing up at a geostrategic. This means we can't treat it like a normal technology. We were going to have to change our mindset. By sharing it with a set of companies and with organizations like the AC, we've made it so that you don't need to trust the claims of the originating company. You can ask them or you can ask for AC. And that has generated, I think, the best information for the world that this is legitimate. And it gives us time to work out what we need to do. And of course, as part of that, you should have some regulation that says you don't get to choose whether or not to release a nuclear bomb.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I think the world we're in is one where AI companies are building the equivalent of nuclear power plants and we just had our first case where when we upgrade the plant a nuclear bomb also falls out of it. You say uh oh this has some implications now As a society do we want there to be more nuclear power? Of course we do. Do we also want to manage the risk of nuclear power? Of course. Do you want to deal with a potential proliferation problem of nuclear power plants spitting out nuclear bombs? Absolutely. Do you need laws for that? Yes, of course you do. Like I'm not sitting here saying leave it to industry. No, the situation I've described is like extremely unusual. And I think the thing which we're trying to do with MIFOS is we're trying to tell the whole story, which is, hey, good news. It keeps being the case that as we make these AI systems better, they are more capable at many of the things that we want them to be capable at, like discovering vulnerabilities in code.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Some might say that this is a scenario that you could encounter as well. Some of this is a choice. It is a choice not just on the part of companies, but how seriously governments take this and how aggressively governments and companies work together to go around critical infrastructure and other providers and secure it.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Just as when our own immune system encounters a new virus and we have no defenses for it, some people get sick, the same will be true in the cyber environment. We will see bad hacks likely proliferate due to AI, and the world will go through some period of adjustment. I do think that on the other side of this, you end up with likely a more robust world from a cyber capability than we've had before”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yes, I think that in the order of a year, another model will arrive that proliferates generally. Absent, that is also a policy choice. So it could be the case that a government like the Chinese government says we shouldn't proliferate an open-wave model that's capable of cyber hacking. There are very incentives and disincentives on this side. What happens to the world? Well, you will see likely a rise in some amount of hacks you will also see a step change in how organizations approach computer security. I think the place that you end up with is one where computer security looks more like a white blood cells in your body where you have many, many AI systems running, as Rory said, all the time at speed patrolling your organization in the software.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Maybe the way to think about it is your CTO has to care about coding capabilities and that your software engineers are getting accelerated, but your CEO, general counsel and board, needs to know about cyber attacks and vulnerabilities. And so MIFOS raises to all of these organizations AI just got real in a domain which you all care about beyond the technologists.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Well, I mean, the issue of, say, cyber attacks or, say, biological weapon attacks is the defender has to be right all the time. The attacker only has to be right once. So these things don't have a relationship of being like symmetric at all. They're extremely asymmetric. And so a lot of what we're trying to do is figure out, okay, is these capabilities arrive? How do you give defenders an advantage? The main thing you can do is give them time, which means finding ways to release these systems to what I think of as a you start with a small circle of organizations and then you try to learn how to expand the circle over time. We are at our small circle of organizations today with Glasswing who have access to MIFOS. The goal is expand it over time such that they can use this to raise the kind of defensive posture of the world and also get intuitions for how you can use AI systems to change cyber defense.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So there's an amazing opportunity here, right? You have systems that now you can turn onto the world's most important software and ask it to find bugs in it, and indeed it is finding thousands of bugs in widely used software at a rate far faster than what these organizations, because we've shared it with third parties, you know, like JPMorgan, Microsoft, others have found in the past.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “We are running an experiment right now into how do you take systems that have this capability and you try to diffuse them into the world in a way that is defense dominant. Because what we know now that this system exists is, okay, at some point in the future it will be systems like this will proliferate. Many people will train them for kind of water level of hacking skill in the world will have risen generically as a consequence of these systems. How do you deal with that environment?”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I mean, the capacity to find bugs in software like Firefox or Windows or your iPhone and hack into it, which is then the key ingredient to cause to carry out hacks or cybercrime.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Great at creative writing, it's great at coding, it's great at biology, but it's similar to a few months ago where AI systems got good enough at coding, but suddenly loads of programmers started using them. It went through some hard to predict point of being sufficiently good at cyber that it gets interesting from the point of experts.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “It's all over the news. Anthropic trained model recently called Mir Foss. It is a standard AI model that uses standard techniques, same as the ones that the other Frontier Labs do. And it's very, very good at a range of skills, including aspects of cyber offense and cyber defense hacking.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So far with some effectiveness, the harder challenge in our future, though, is what happens when we have capabilities that are the same as or better than the best single group of biologists in the world, which is what we have right now with systems capable of cyber offense. And then the question becomes, okay, how do you think about access at the state level or the corporate level for these capabilities which are now transformative at the high end as well? Should we switch?”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “To restrict this area because there is no interest in things that have the potential for vast collateral or uncontrollable damage. States prefer military capabilities that can be a lot more targeted. A bioweapon is almost the definition of a thing which is very hard to target and has huge spillover effects. So for bio, you need to basically solve for two challenges. One, how do you make it hard for individual actors to access knowledge like”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Those that, well, the number of people, this gets to the point, right? The number of people that want to visit harm on others in the world is relatively small for this kind of horrendous act. And they typically aren't trained biologists. And if they are, carrying out acts of terrorism or usually doesn't require you to not be a lone wolf, it requires some amount of coordination. Now the risks of AI systems are AI systems are universal educators. And if you take either an individual or small set of people that want to commit some act of bioterrorism and they have the ability to access a universal educator which is versed in every aspect of biology, then suddenly those people have been accelerated and they've been accelerated without paying the coordination costs or conspiracy costs that typically allow us to find groups of maniacs in the world. Additionally, at the state level, states are controlled in this domain by many agreements between states.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “The best way to think of it is that biology is inherently dual use, right? It's the science of what our bodies are made of. Now, the experts that can build things like vaccine candidates also have the same expertise needed to build things that could cause terrible havoc in the realm of viruses. Why don't they? Well, the world doesn't incentivize for this. The world doesn't want this to happen. And also there are things like biological weapons treaties. This has been a topic of discussion among governments for a long time. And also the basic goodness of people. There aren't that many people that want to just visit harm on others. There are some, but not many.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I would save a question of what you do about proliferation of national security capabilities that touch on cyber or bio or like nuclear is exactly the kind of thing that traditionally has been the domain of nations trying to talk with one another about non-proliferation regimes, safety regimes, testing regimes. That is clearly an area where we're going to need to have some agreements with TIF eventually.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Push on this, where how do you trust a plane that has taken off in another country with a different governance system and different regulatory system to your own? It's because you have common standards on things like aerospace safety and testing authorities which exist in each of these different countries or sometimes of a regional level. And planes are able to take off in countries, including countries which are at war with one another sometimes, and land in each other's countries because you have reciprocal technocratic standards organizations that are actually facilitating some shared notion of safety. Now the things like the UK AC, which have been replicated in the US, China has its own efforts here, other countries have their own, is exactly the beginnings of what you need for some of this notion of what standards look like. Now, is that going to cover everything? No, for some of the larger risks, you're going to need bilateral or multilateral agreements between countries and high-level diplomatic”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And the AC has built cybersecurity tests, which neither of our companies has seen. We, our technical staff, believe in the legitimacy of the tests AC has built because we trust for the talent there, which is extraordinary. And the AC has built a test that governments around the world can trust for cyber risks because it wasn't built by a company. It is them impartially testing our systems. If you'd said to me in 20, we're going to build an entirely new function within the UK government that does frontier testing of AI systems for most powerful AI systems that will ever be built, and they will invent their own tests that won't come from the companies. And these tests will be better than the In countries around the world, it's been replicated in the US. They could do with more money in the US, but we'll get back.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Well, now we have the UK AC evaluating both Mythos and GPT five point five from two separate companies on cybersecurity challenges which the UK AC has built in partnership with UK intelligence community.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I mean, I'd say there was an era where you wanted to run a range of experiments on different organizational designs, different research agendas. That era has happened. I think we're entering an era where you actually need to do serious coordination, including between governments. It's great that China and the US actually recently discussed AI at a high-level summit. But also you're going to have to bring companies and governments in other parts of society together to talk about this because the era to keep having all gas no breaks is probably entering the rearview mirror, right? It's not sustainable to keep this going. And we have to somehow force a larger conversation on what do we want to do with this technology and how do we want it to be developed.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “To do it then. But I wouldn't claim that it's because you're claiming on our end, oh, this approach is definitely wrong. It's more, we have an approach that we think is going to be subtly different and we want to run the experiment in the most pure way possible. Just form a company.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I would think of it more that the great thing about the world is you get to run a range of different experiments. I view all of these as organizational experiments. There's an organization that was already within one of the large tech companies trying to build AI. There was an organization that starts as a nonprofit and then converted itself into sort of a for-profit for capital purposes, which is OpenAI, but is trying to build it. And then after a few years of sitting around working together, I think we realized that we had our own vision for how to build a safety-focused organization. And we viewed it very much as the time to build another experiment in this domain is now, because back in 2020, you can get a sense of how expensive for whole projects of building AI is about to be. Opening ISAS in 2016 of a billion dollars, you're sitting there saying, oh, it's four years later we're going to need a ton of money to do this.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Thinking about safety allows you to think about what I think of as the most ambitious technological optimist version of Fechek, which is where you've been able to deploy it very, very broadly.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Taking safety of AI systems seriously requires you to hold in your head how powerful they might become in the future. And I think that this notion of the technology not being as it is today, but moving very quickly to become a lot more advanced, has been both important for motivating the research agendas because you build a different research agenda if you believe something is about to happen in the future, some change up in scale. But also safety has ended up being extremely coupled to our ability to deploy this technology. You know, as for technology gets more powerful, deployment into society is gated by, oh, well, if it's good at hacking, how do you make sure that you can deploy the good parts of coding but not hacking? If it's good at biology research, how do you stop the proliferation of bioweapon capabilities? But how do you allow useful biology to happen? These are very subtle questions that drive very, very complicated research agendas. And so”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Had ever been built to work for a problem, you developed infrastructure that hadn't existed before, you encountered bugs at the frontier of scale which no one had encountered, and you also started to build up this information of, huh, every time we dump more compute into these systems on these outrageous challenges, they get better. So you started to develop this important intuition that actually we could scale the performance of AI systems not just through having clever ideas as human researchers, but allocating more compute to the training of them, which turned out to be one of the most important insights for what subsequently has happened.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Exactly. And OpenAI was announced to have a $1 billion funding amount from commitments from Elon Musk and others. And so it was serious about the capital requirements. Now, then I get there and you realize there isn't a plan. You're like, what's the plan to build artificial general intelligence? And no one knows because no one has an idea of what to do at the time. You don't have language models. You were running an amazing series of experiments at the company, which were basically all oriented around ambition. Can we train an AI system that could beat humans at a complex video game? Can we train an AI system to operate a robot hand? Can we train an AI system to end up being able to generate text? Now that last one turned out to be very important, but all of the other projects were important for having an organization that was continually doing unbelievably ambitious things that seemed like outrageously bold goals and through trying to work on those goals, you built bigger systems.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “I think even at the time it was not that well known, there were a bunch of adorable misfits and weirdos who believed in what was going to happen with AI, but it was not even that high status or well-known in Silicon Valley initially. And actually, you were competing against DeepMind, which was already very established. So there was questions of...”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Amazingly like fast growing big startup now. And there were many, many other names like that. So from my perspective, I was like, this is the team. It has a mandate to do, try and make powerful AI systems for the benefit of humanity. If there was ever a moment to stack all my chips on AI, it was then. So I resigned from Bloomberg and I got many emails that day and comments from people I'd looked up to saying I was making the worst mistake of my life.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I at the time had been making charts as a journalist, plotting performance on machine learning benchmarks. And I remember putting the chart in and being like, oh my goodness, it's happening. I have to move to Silicon Valley right now. So Ilya notorious for that had written many foundational papers at Google already. Dario had studied some of the early scaling work on things like speech recognition initially at Baidu, and then he'd worked at Google and written a paper called Concrete Problems in AI Safety grappling with future safety issues of powerful AI systems. In 2015, and it's hard for me to express how completely berserk it seems to be writing papers about the safety issues of powerful AI systems when all you have a computer vision systems that just barely work some of the time. And then there were, you know, Greg Bachmann, who was known as just notoriously one of the best, most talented engineers in the world. He'd helped found Stripe, which is an”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yes, you know, Iliasutskeva had been on the team up in Toronto with Jeff Hinton, another famous Bret, who had cracked the image net challenge and image recognition challenge in 2012 by training a system using neural networks on graphical processing units made by Nvidia, which subsequently became quite important.”

    2026-05-31 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source