Anthropic co-founder actually wants AI to slow down
📅 Jun 05, 2026CNN8 MIN49599 VIEWS14 SEGMENTS · 4 SPEAKERS
AI models are rapidly improving – so fast that they may soon be able to develop themselves without human involvement. That’s why Anthropic is warning the AI industry: It needs to build a “brake pedal,” or companies risk losing control of their creations.
AI systems that can advance themselves, known as “full recursive self-improvement,” could have the potential for great good for science and health care, they also pose great risks for humanity, according to a blog post written by Marina Favaro, leader of The Anthropic Institute, and Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic.
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What Jack Clark said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Jack Clark, cofounder of Anthropic, said recursive self-improvement, where AI systems can autonomously design and develop their own successors, is likely to arrive within the next few years rather than decades, sooner than institutions are prepared for. He argued the upside is a dramatic acceleration in science, with AI becoming creative co-scientists in fields like medicine and biology. The main risk, he said, is the inability to validate, verify, or trust the behavior of these systems, comparing it to dropping hundreds or thousands of new colleagues into a newsroom. Clark said Anthropic will keep building the technology but wants the industry to have a 'brake pedal' option to pause or slow AI development, allowing society to catch up. He suggested starting by publicly stating this desire, then talking with companies and governments, noting that Cold War rivals found ways to stabilize the nuclear arms race.
Key takeaways
Clark said recursive self-improvement could arrive in the next few years, not decades, sooner than institutions are prepared for.
Clark said the industry needs a 'brake pedal' option to pause or slow AI development, not just a gas pedal.
Clark said the risk is the inability to validate, verify, or trust the behavior of these systems.
Clark said AI systems could become creative co-scientists, dramatically accelerating science in medicine and biology.
Clark said companies should publicly state they want the option to slow down, then talk with governments and other companies.
Mr. Clark, you said that we are trending toward a, quote, AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor, which is called recursive self-improvement, and that it could, quote, come sooner than most institutions are prepared for. Let's start with what is recursive self-improvement exactly? The original goal of the AI industry, the AI researchers, has been to build.
Systems smart enough that they could become a generally competent scientist and make scientific discoveries, one of which would be figuring out how to build better AI systems. I think it's highly likely now that we're on the cusp of developing systems that are capable of just that, and they may come along in the next few years rather than decades, a lot sooner than I think people had been anticipating. The upside potential of this is huge, as is the potential risk of this.
In the world in areas like biology or medicine or robotics, you have to take these systems that mostly exist as digital AI systems and adapt them into this complex domain in the real world. And you do that by pairing with scientists to do it. Now, an AI system capable of improving itself is also capable of going into domains like medicine, going into domains like biology, discovering what it needs to get smarter and more capable, and working with people to adapt itself to improve its performance there. So I think what we're seeing is the potential for a dramatic acceleration in science in the coming years as these AI systems gain this capability and become much more like creative co-scientists than tools that scientists use, which would be a big change.
The downside, I mean, for anybody who's seen any science fiction movie – and I hate to be so, uh, given my lack of science knowledge, a lot of it comes from science fiction movies – but obviously in all the science fiction movies we give control to these machines, and obviously we all know what happens, and the people who create them are the first ones who get killed, and then they run amok in human society. What is the, what, what to you is the risk here?
Yeah, we read the science fiction and watch science fiction here as well, so it's not lost on us that this is how some of the stories start. And the risk here is what happens if you can't validate or verify or trust the behavior of these systems. It would be like if we dropped hundreds or thousands of new colleagues into your newsroom. It would take you a while to figure out if you can trust them, if they work in the way that you expect, if when you ask them to do things, they come back with something that you think is good and in line with your expectations. That's one of the challenges here. How do you maintain control over fleets of scientists that are much larger and much faster than ones you've had before?
7 more exchanges in this transcript
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Clark, J. (2026, June 5). Anthropic co-founder actually wants AI to slow down [Interview transcript]. CNN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1004103/
MLA
Jack Clark. "Anthropic co-founder actually wants AI to slow down." CNN, 5 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1004103/.
BibTeX
@misc{clark2026_1004103,
author = {Jack Clark},
title = {Anthropic co-founder actually wants AI to slow down},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNN. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1004103/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
