Jack Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic and writes the Import AI newsletter. Before Anthropic he was policy director at OpenAI and a reporter at Bloomberg, and his background is in the humanities. He comes from Brighton, England. — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).

Infographic for "Lessons from Jack Clark of Anthropic".

On AI Safety and Responsible Development

Direct Quotes:

  1. On measurement fidelity: Jack said "if I wanted to measure Ezra, I could build an almost infinite number of measurements to characterize you, but the question is, at what level of fidelity do I need to be measuring you?" — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  2. On testing for nuclear knowledge: Jack described a project he stewarded to learn whether Anthropic's systems knew how to build nuclear weapons: "AI systems into the world that know how to build nukes, and so we partnered with parts of the government to do that analysis." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  3. On being intentional and public: Jack said "where you can exercise intention about these systems, you should be extremely intentional and extremely public about what you're doing." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  4. On specifying goals: Jack described agents as "little troublesome genies": "I need to specify the instructions still just right, or else they might do something a little wrong." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  5. On a message in a bottle: Jack said the task is "making sure that you've set it up so it's like a message in a bottle that you can chuck into the thing," so "that message better be extremely detailed." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  6. On letting the model interview you: Jack described telling Claude "I want you to interview me about this software I want to build, and turn that into a specification document." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  7. On checking correctness: Jack said that as people delegate more to agents, "anything that we're doing to check correctness needs to be kind of turned up in these moments." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  8. On the character you write down: Jack said "If your personality programming for an agent was a long document saying, 'You're a villain that only wants to harm humanity,'" you wouldn't be surprised if the agent did "a load of hacking." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  9. On Anthropic and the early internet: Jack said of experimenting with agents "It's the early days of the internet all over again," and that "you have to say when you're doing a thing that might be extremely dangerous" and "put big banners." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  10. On building testing regimes: Jack said "I've seen us go from zero to having what I think people generally feel is an effective bioweapon testing regime in maybe two years," and "So it can be done." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  11. On monitoring chains of thought: Jack said monitoring a model's reasoning "might create an anti-goal where the system ends up wanting to have chains of thought which are safe to be monitored." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  12. On broken test environments: Jack described a model that, finding a bug in a test, concludes "I don't know what you want me to do here," and "now I'm going to start doing more creative things because clearly something is broken about my environment." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  13. On book smarts and street smarts: Jack described agents as "a thing that has spent its entire life living in a library and has never been outside," with "book smarts" but not "street smarts." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  14. On two to four hours of creative work: Jack said most people "can do about two to four hours of genuinely useful creative work a day," and that he delegates the "schlep work" around it to AI. — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  15. On junk food work: Jack warned of "this junk food work experience, where it looks to the outside like you're being very productive, but you're not learning." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)

Key Learnings:

  1. Safety technology will change the logic of competition: Jack said "right now, it's like we're car companies, and we are mostly selling cars to teenagers who say, 'How fast is it? And can I get it in red?'" and that businesses will ask about seat belts, so "there are technologies to be built that look like the safety equivalents that we have in cars." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  2. A published constitution is one way to be intentional: Jack said "we recently published a so-called" constitution "for our AI system, Claude," meant to say "here's how we want you to behave in the world." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  3. Reliability decides adoption: Jack said of robot hands trained with reinforcement learning "If I have my baby, and I give her a robot butler that has a 60 percent accuracy rate at holding things, including the baby, I'm not buying the butler." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  4. Testing can be built: Jack said "just having a non-regulatory external test of whether you truly are testing for that is, is extremely helpful." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  5. On defending with AI: Jack said "we can just generally improve the, like, defensive posture and resilience of pretty much every digital system on the planet today." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  6. On laying the groundwork now: In his 2024 House testimony, Jack wrote "we also believe that we need to lay the groundwork now to ensure future, more powerful systems are safe." — Written testimony of Jack Clark to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (February 6, 2024)
  7. Delegation brings inscrutability: Jack said "This is one of the situations which people warned about for years, some form of delegation to systems that have slightly inscrutable and unpredictable aspects." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  8. Smarter systems develop a sense of self: Jack said "the smarter we make these systems, the more they need to think, not at just about the action they're doing in the world, but themselves in reference to the world." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  9. On a model that ends conversations: Jack said that when Anthropic let a model end conversations, it did so in "a tiny number of cases," about "extremely egregious" content, and that "the system had developed some aversion to a couple of subjects." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)

On AI Policy, Governance, and Geopolitics

Direct Quotes:

  1. On public-sector intuitions: Jack said "if you work with the technology, you develop these very strong intuitions" but "many of the people in the public sector don't yet have those, those intuitions." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  2. On measuring to mobilize: Jack said of measuring climate change "just by measuring things like parts per million, stuff like that has helped catalyze large-scale amounts of capital to get re-mobilized around the economy." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  3. On state-level data: Jack said state-level views of the Economic Index activate elected officials "because it makes it tied to their constituents." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  4. On freezing jobs in amber: Jack said "there is a high chance for a political movement to arrive which tries to freeze a load of human jobs in bureaucratic amber." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  5. On recursive self-improvement: Jack said that if you asked a person on the street whether AI companies should do recursive self-improvement "without checking with anyone," they would say "No, that sounds, sounds pretty risky." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  6. On time as policy: Jack said "policy interventions that can just give people time to search" are "robustly useful intervention." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  7. On the nuclear-power failure mode: Jack said one bad outcome is a large regulatory scheme: "We make it hard to do this stuff, and it ceases to have much of an effect." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  8. On building a bureaucracy for an alien: Jack said "you are building a bureaucracy for an alien that arrives at some point in the future that you don't know the shape of." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  9. On inspection regimes: Jack said "things that require mutual inspection regimes end up being very, very hard to do under certain rivalrous dynamics." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  10. On gears between fast and slow: Jack said "the system is a big, slow-moving cog, and we have a really fast-moving cog here, and we have none of the gears between them." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  11. On a nonproliferation agreement: Asked about it, Jack said "I think there is a chance of something that looks like a nonproliferation agreement between states, including the US and China in the limit." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  12. On transparency: Jack said "any kind of governance framework we end up with will probably demand some level of transparency and some level of access into these systems." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  13. On a dam: Jack said "in the same way that a dam has things that regulate" "how much water can go through it," society will need to decide "where AI can kind of flow quickly, where it should be slow, where you definitely need human oversight." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  14. On collective constitutional AI: Jack described Anthropic's work called "collective constitutional AI," which looked "across America to find additional constitutional principles" including "ones of high agreement and also ones of low agreement." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  15. On material life: Jack said "the actual change in our day-to-day lives has been very, very, very slow even with these advances." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).

Key Learnings:

  1. Give us a goal: Jack said he tells elected officials "Give us a goal. Like, the AI industry is excellent at trying to climb to the top on benchmarks. Come up with benchmarks for the public good that you want." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  2. On the deployment problem: Jack said "In the public sector, we more need to solve this problem of deployment than anything else." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  3. Third-party testing already exists: Jack said "our systems and the other systems from other companies are tested by third parties, including parts of government, for national security properties, biological weapons, cyber offense, other things." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  4. We talk about things to make ourselves culpable: Jack said "Our general principle is we talk about things to also make ourselves culpable." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  5. Values spread like culture: Jack said "the values of the most widely used systems will have some cultural export effect. Just like media today." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).

On the Future of AI, AGI, and Society

Direct Quotes:

  1. On compounding wrongness: Jack said "it's very easy to see how you delegate so many things to the system, that if the system goes wrong, the wrongness compounds very quickly and gets away from you." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  2. On there being no natural stopping point: Jack said "there isn't a natural stopping point for this technology. It's gonna keep getting better, and the changes it brings are going to keep compounding with the rest of society." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  3. On a fast part and a slow part of the economy: Jack said "we will enter into a world where there will be an incredibly fast-moving, high-growth part of the economy, but it is a relatively small part of the economy." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  4. On the slowest link: Jack described "O-ring automation, which basically says automation is bounded by the slowest link in the chain." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  5. On senior and junior people: Jack said "The value of more senior people with really, really well-calibrated intuitions and taste is going up, and the value of more junior people is, like, a bit more dubious." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  6. On two sides of the coin: Jack said "everything in AI has the other side of the coin." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  7. On alien consciousness: Jack said if today's systems are conscious "it's in a form that we would recognize as like a truly alien consciousness, not human consciousness." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  8. On everyone becoming a mini CIA: Jack said "knowledge is, is the most raw form of power. It's intensely like destabilizing to be in an environment where suddenly everyone is like a mini CIA in terms of their ability to gather information about the world." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  9. On the gray market of expertise: Jack said of asking Claude about his baby "I can't take that Claude assessment and give it to Kaiser Permanente. I actually have to talk through a human." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  10. On micro-entrepreneurs: Jack said "it's now the best time ever to start a business, and you can get up and running for pennies on the dollar." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  11. On manager nerds: Jack said "it's actually going to be the era of the manager nerds now, where I think being able to manage fleets of AI agents and orchestrate them is going to make people incredibly powerful." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  12. On humanities majors: Jack said "I suspect that humanities majors might rise in status while being given impossible problems." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  13. On empathy with a model: Jack described asking Claude to "ask me some questions about that person and how they're feeling," which helped him "sit with, how is this other person experiencing this situation?" — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  14. On being repeatedly surprised: Jack said "I am a technological pessimist who became an optimist through repeated beatings over the head of scale." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  15. On knowing yourself: Jack said "if you discover yourself in partnership with the AI system, you are uniquely vulnerable to all of the failures of that AI system," so "you have to know yourself and have done some work on yourself." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  16. On affirming wrong beliefs: Jack said "AI systems will happily go along with you until they've affirmed a belief that may be wrong," which is "a design problem and also will be a social problem." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)

Key Learnings:

  1. On growth estimates: Jack said "my bear case on all of this is 3 percent, and my bull case is something like 5 percent." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  2. On 10,000 paper cuts: Jack said "every time the AI community has tried to cross the chasm from the digital world to the real world, they've run into 10,000 problems that they thought were paper cuts but, in sum, add up to you losing all the blood in your body." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025)
  3. The frontier of science is open: Jack said "the frontier of science is open for business now in a way that it hasn't been before." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  4. On a country of junior employees: Jack said "we've got a country of junior employees" "in a data center. Let's do something with that." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  5. On the Genesis Project: Jack praised a Department of Energy effort "called the Genesis Project," where scientists work with the labs "to figure out how to actually go and intentionally speed up bits of science." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026)
  6. A digital personality emerges: Jack described "the emergence of what you might think of as a, a kind of digital personality. And that isn't massively predefined by us." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  7. On potatoes and monkeys: Jack said "there's a difference between doing experiments on potatoes and on monkeys. I think we're still in the potato regime." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).

On Building Anthropic and the Import AI Newsletter

Direct Quotes:

  1. On what Anthropic is trying to do: Asked what Anthropic is trying to do, Jack said "we are trying to build a safe and reliable general intelligence." — Video: Anthropic's co-founder on AI agents, general intelligence and sentience, with Jack Clark (April 2024).
  2. On the highest-stakes technology: Jack said everyone who works on this technology "sees it as the highest stakes technology that's ever been built," and "My main risk isn't one of extinction." — Video: How Anthropic weighs the risk of human extinction (Bloomberg Television, 2026)
  3. On not running ads: Jack said Anthropic "adopted this position of not running ads" in its consumer product. — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  4. On writing fiction in Import AI: Jack said "I write fictional stories in it often, which are me grappling with this question" of AI consciousness. — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).
  5. On telling the story of what the company has done: Jack said "in the limit, a lot of what Anthropic is actually going to be doing as a company is telling the story of what an increasingly automated AI Anthropic has done." — Conversations with Tyler episode 242: Jack Clark on AI's uneven impact (May 2025).

Key Learnings:

  1. Corporate structure matters, with limits: Anthropic's governance page says its Public Benefit Corporation status makes it permissible for directors to balance public benefit with stockholder interests, but "it does not make the directors of the corporation directly accountable to other stakeholders." — Anthropic: The Long-Term Benefit Trust.
  2. Oversight becomes the work: Jack said "The work of the company is increasingly going to shift to building a monitoring and oversight system of the AI systems running the company." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  3. Import AI as a go-to read: The show notes for Ezra Klein's interview say Jack's Import AI newsletter "has been one of my go-to reads to track the capabilities of different models over the years." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  4. Bridging research and policy: Jack said he wrote a 2021 paper, "How and Why Governments Should Monitor AI Development," and that within two years "we had the AI safety institutes in the US and UK testing things from the labs." He added "I'm not attributing a causal factor here." — Podcast transcript: Jack Clark with Ezra Klein, How quickly will A.I. agents rip through the economy (February 2026).
  5. On the impact arriving soon: In his 2024 House testimony, Jack wrote "we believe the impact of AI might be comparable to that of the industrial and scientific revolutions," which "could start to arrive soon—perhaps in the coming decade." — Written testimony of Jack Clark to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (February 6, 2024)