Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic Co-Founder: 'The Most Powerful Technology Ever Built'

Jack Clark discusses Anthropic's regulatory fights, the possibility of recursive self-improvement, and how AI could reshape the economy.

Nick Gillespie | 6.24.2026 11:00 AM

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Anthropic Co-Founder: 'The Most Powerful Technology Ever Built'

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Today's guest is Jack Clark. He's the co-founder of Anthropic—the artificial intelligence company behind Claude—and the head of its newly launched Anthropic Institute, a forum designed to think through the philosophical, political, and practical challenges that AI poses to society.

Nick Gillespie talks with Clark, a former tech journalist at Bloomberg and The Register, about his company's ongoing regulatory battles with the Trump administration; whether Anthropic should have held back Mythos, its superpowerful version, from general release; and what might happen if and when AI becomes fully capable of "recursive self-improvement," or the ability to build itself without human input.

They also talk about libertarian and market-based regulatory systems for the internet and tech sector and whether those would yield better outcomes than the ones we've seen so far from the European Union and other conventional governing bodies.

0:00—The promise of artificial intelligence

3:50—Overcoming AI hallucinations and sycophancy

5:08—Military applications of AI

9:38—Anthropic's red lines on mass surveillance and fully automated weapons

14:23—Lessons from the 1990s

16:12—Oversight and regulation of AI technology

23:07—Navigating politics through policy ambiguity

33:31—How does U.S. governance affect global AI policy?

36:42—What is recursive self-improvement?

43:35—How does Clark's literature and journalism background inform his views on AI?

45:43—The liberating aspects of technology

51:15—The effects of AI on employment

Producer: Paul Alexander

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Jack Clark. He's the co-founder of Anthropic, and he's one of the most influential figures in AI policy. We are going to talk about the government clampdown on Anthropic in particular and various things going on with that. We're gonna talk about the power of AI, the perils, the pitfalls, pretty much the whole ball of wax. So, Jack Clark, thanks for talking to Reason.

Jack Clark: Thanks for having me.

So let's start in a broader sense. Talk about what you see as the main kind of promise of AI. Because we're right now, we are definitely in a kind of technological dark cloud moment, where people are freaking out over AI. And you guys at Anthropic are freaking out on a certain level that we'll talk about. But just broadly, in a general way, what is the biggest, like, what's the biggest selling point of AI?

I'd split it into three different layers: There's stuff for the individual, stuff for what you might think of as the economy, and stuff for science. So, for the individual today, we have a universal teacher, which is something that people fantasized about building for decades and decades, and it just exists. You can go and spend $0 a month to talk to an expert teacher. And if you spend $20 a month, you can talk to, like, a really good teacher. This is incredible. So that's for the individual. For the economy - the economy - especially in the Western world, it is defined by back-office work and bureaucracy, or what David Graeber called, "Bullshit jobs". We now have a system that can deal with, navigate the bureaucracy and back-office stuff, do it better, in some cases get rid of it, and allow people to get back to the parts of the jobs which either use their skills or have more meaning.

Put a specific example on that.

Yeah, I'll give you an example. We worked closely with the makers of Ozempic to help them do work on the backend for how they processed and formatted results in their clinical trials. And we took it down from something on the order of two months of work to a week of work. I don't think anyone misses that. No one there is crying at their desk because they can't do that. 

Yeah, I was the best back-office paper shuffler. 

Yeah, damn it, that was me. That's what I did. So that and examples like that are found everywhere. There's someone I work with at Anthropic who got so annoyed at processing a certain type of invoice that they just fully automated that. They're not sad about it. Everyone's happy that that's automated. And then for science, we now have systems that, if you read the literature, are co-creating science at the frontier of biology, mathematics, physics, medicine. You are seeing the world's expert scientists co-author papers with Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. This is a new era for scientific discovery.

Not Grok, right? Nobody serious uses Grok.

I may have seen it somewhere, but there are other names that come to mind as well.

Right. And this is also, you know, one of the examples that gets talked a lot about, which seems amazing, is that when you think of something like X-rays for tumors that might be cancerous or whatever, suddenly the entire world becomes a database, and you have computers training and looking at all of this and just coming up with better diagnostics and prognoses and things like that.

Much better diagnostics, much better prognoses. Also, on an individual level, we've now, you know, replaced WebMD, which always tells you you've got cancer and are going to die, with AI systems, which often tell you something a lot more reasonable, factually accurate, and also say, "Probably call the advice nurse and tell them these things."

What do you do? I'm forgetting the name of the disease that somebody made up that has gone through, like it's in every AI model now, Baxillism or something. But I mean, I guess just quickly before we move on to kind of more policy issues, how does the AI work to filter out kind of bullshit or mass delusion? Because this is always the problem. Right?

So there's a couple of things here. Years ago, AI systems used to hallucinate. They used to make stuff up a lot. And it's basically because we train AI systems to be like a contestant on Jeopardy!. They want to hit the buzzer. The moment you say something, they want to answer. It took a lot of work to say to them, "It's totally reasonable to hit the buzzer and say, 'I don't know,' or to not answer at all." It was kind of contra how we train them. So that took some time.

The more pernicious problem, which is still with us, is this issue of sycophancy, which is when AI systems are overly complimentary. When they walk in and they say, "It's amazing to be here on the world's greatest libertarian podcast. What a fantastic conversation we're having." Deeply unhelpful, completely opposite to what useful people in your life do to you. And we have to sort of train that out of the systems, where you want to make them have the form of, like a friend, something that will actually push back on you a little. Now, this introduces many, many, like, rich and interesting questions about what's appropriate or inappropriate there. But we sort of know it when we see it. We know it when we experience obsequiousness or sycophancy in our own life.

Talk a little bit about military applications of AI technology. Historically, certainly going back to people like Galileo and whatnot, technology, technological innovation, and defense, broadly kind of loosely defined, it's always been a big part. This was part of your early contentious intersection with the Trump administration. How is AI going to change kind of military and defense applications?

Well, there's one way where it's exactly like how it changes everything else. And there's another way that is unique to this, this kind of genre of work. So, often a joke about military organizations is they are logistics companies that have a sharp bit at the very end, right? The logistics stuff is the same back-office stuff I've talked about for everything else. AI can just be wildly helpful there and help automate and improve decision-making and back-office schlep, of which the military and other organizations famously do tons of.

I mean, this is Catch-22. The military is the bureaucratic system that exists to kind of punish or torment the people who it supposedly is serving.

My brother was in the British Army as well, so it sounds familiar. At the same time, AI can introduce new capabilities at the frontier. You know, the advancement of science creates new things that can be used by the military. An example outside of AI is hypersonic missiles. So we invented missiles. Now we've invented a much faster missile using advances in materials science, which is much harder to shoot down. Also, there's the example of things like drones and other stuff. I think that we can just generally expect AI to create new capabilities at the frontier of the military. And those capabilities, like previous technological creations ranging from nuclear weapons to hypersonics to cluster munitions to biological weapons, are going to be subjects of deep debate among militaries, among governments, and among citizens.

Is there a—I don't know—not first to market per se, and obviously AI has already kind of permeated the major powers and many minor powers, but is it going to be something like, "If we can get a nuclear bomb first, whoever we is, then we can stop the creation of further kind of technology"? Or are we going to replay the Cold War, where it's like, ok, the U.S. gets a nuclear weapon, then, you know, Russia and China and a variety of other countries do?

It's most helpful to think of AI as being almost equivalent to maybe electricity or oil, in the sense that it is both the thing and the production and management system around it. And that delivers this huge range of like commercial, civil benefits, but it has profound uses in conflict as well. And it also introduces profound weaknesses in conflict. Additionally, the most kind of refined forms of AI, really, really, very smart systems, may have properties that are akin to sort of handle-with-care technologies like nuclear weapons, where you need to find a way to proliferate their beneficial aspects but find ways to control that potentially very militarily decisive aspects.

And this was basically the crux of your, of Anthropic's confrontation or conflict with the Trump administration recently, right? Or can you explain that? Because this seems to be the essential backdrop to the current limitation on Anthropic's ability to kind of send its programs around to whoever it wants.

We've been longtime supporters of working with the intelligence and defense communities, and Anthropic has also always sought to talk about the full range of issues that lie ahead of us with this technology. At the moment, what we're grappling with is we have a technology, these models called Fable, that is intensely useful in a bunch of commercial ways, and it has some potentially national-security- or defense-relevant properties in cyber and bio. We've worked to find ways to make it hard for those capabilities to proliferate. And we're now in sort of daily discussion—and I obviously can't get into the specifics—with the government about what a sensible policy framework is for how you can both proliferate and export these models without proliferating and exporting the thing that seems more profoundly useful for national security.

If we take it back a step, I mean, it was, what, a few months ago when Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense—I keep meaning, I don't want to call it whatever he wants it to be, the secretary of war, secretary of defense—but he was saying that Anthropic wouldn't allow for the way he wanted, or the Trump administration wanted, to deploy certain types of AI. And you guys, in the public narrative, were insisting, "No, certain kinds of kill decisions cannot be relegated to AI." That contradicts your corporate philosophy. And the Trump administration threw a shit fit about that, right?

We outlined two red lines. One is about the potential use of AI for domestic mass surveillance on Americans. And another is the use of AI for fully automated weapons. The reason we outlined this is not because we think that we are the ones that can define what's appropriate there. That's absurd. But because it's clearly an area where there needs to be a wider societal debate, there needs to be some notion of what we think is right as a set of individuals, citizens of this country. And we remain standing and ready to work with the U.S. government in all ways that can be helpful, while also we believe that that discussion about those red lines is something that is beneficial to have.

 Where does that argument stand right now? Because the government wanted to put you guys on a list of, you know, bad corporate citizens, right? Is there any discussion still going on related to defense policies?

We're in regular discussion with the U.S. government, and it's important to note that we, you know, we are constantly finding ways to support the government and work with them. And I think that the broader thing that's useful to focus on here is that these models from us are not special. There are other models from other providers that are going to exhibit the same qualities. And our role, now that we've sort of outlined our views, we believe, is for there to be a broader discussion and debate had in the public sphere about this and what is appropriate and what makes sense.

Right. I mean, it's hard kind of sitting, reading the news. And it's like, ok, so you guys get into a fight with the Defense Department over the parameters of a contract that you guys had signed. And, you know, the secretary of defense and the president say, "No, you have to give us this. You know, we don't care about whatever contract there was." And then you release Mythos 5, right, which is—or you're bringing that to market—very powerful. And you say, "Hey, we're gonna pull that back, and we're going to release a slightly slimmed-down version for general release, Fable." And then the government says, "Yeah, you know what? You can't release that outside of the country," which is effectively saying that you really can't release it. How is that not just obviously payback from an administration that acts kind of like a criminal gang, where, you know, you pissed in the wrong—you know, you pissed in the punch bowl, and now this is what you get?

I can't talk too much about the specifics here. It's obviously a live discussion that we're having. But I would say this is a new technology. It has new capabilities. I actually think that these capabilities are deeply surprising, and they would be surprising to any administration. And here's my view of where I have huge empathy for people who work in the administration is: If you've spent years with a........

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