Today's podcast is an interview with one of the co-founders of the AI company Anthropic, Jack Clark. One thing I'm trying to do on the subject of artificial intelligence on this show is to offer a balance of perspectives on an issue where I find most coverage tends to be extremely one-sided. Some people are very certain that AI is a bubble and some people are certain that it is not. Some are certain that AI will destroy millions of jobs and others are sure that it will not. And I want listeners of this show to feel like every time they hear an intelligent take on one side of these issues, the next episode they'll hear will offer in some way a countervailing take. So two weeks ago, you heard the investor and writer Paul Kedrosky argue that artificial intelligence was an economic bubble. But if any single data point pierces that narrative, it's this. Between December 2025 and this month, March 2026, Anthropic more than doubled its annual recurring revenue from $9 billion to more than 20 billion. According to several analysts, there is no record of any company ever growing this fast at this scale. Now, I don't need Jack Clark or anybody at Anthropic to read me a corporate statement about the company's revenue growth. I can very easily do that myself. What I wanted to do today was to ask questions that only someone in Jack's position could answer. Questions like, if Anthropic's executives believe that AI might be as dangerous as nuclear weapons, what right does any private business have to build this sort of thing for profit? Four, how does the company balance its reputation as the industry leader in caution and safety with its other reputation for being one of the fastest developers of this technology? And if artificial intelligence has the capacity to produce, as its CEO Dario Amodei said, a country of geniuses in a data center. Why do Americans overall say they disapprove of AI more than just about every other institution and individual in the world? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.
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Jack Clark, welcome to the show.
Thanks very much for having me. I believe you and I were on paternity leave right around the same time. My daughter was born the first week of December. Does that roughly line up with your schedule?
Yeah, my second child, my son, was born the first week of November.
Okay. So we are meeting each other in a shared space at mutual exhaustion which is always nice. Hopefully that leads to some kind of symbiosis.
I was thinking about holding this question for the end, but it might be the most important question I ask, so I might as well just get it out in front. You're building a technology that you think is going to change the world and change the nature of work more than anything since the computer, maybe electricity, maybe anything else. If you're right, our kids' futures are going to be profoundly reshaped, maybe ruined by this technology. And I wonder how that sits with you. You know, how you go to work and you work on Claude and then you go home and you raise your children. When you bridge those two lives, how do you think about the art of raising kids in a world where there's a technology coming on down the pike that will always already be smarter than us at almost everything, which is at least the goal of your company? How do you sit with that and how do you think about raising your kids?
I mean I spend a lot of time thinking about this but I also think as you know when you become a parent all the cliches are true and things that you learn are like it's not about external validation it's really about having a good sense of your own self and various pat phrases like this but when I look at my kids and I think about myself and my own experience of this technology, being curious about the world, being interested in the world and getting joy from experiencing the world and learning about it are how I stay calm and stay ready for this technology evolution that's happening all around us. When I look at my children, the main thing I'm doing is spending time encouraging them to develop passions like reading and playing and exploring the world because whatever happens with the technology, growing through any period of change requires you to have some sense of yourself that isn't massively contingent on a changing environment outside and some sense of innate curiosity and a world that you can live in inside your own head. I think that just stems from encouraging curiosity and encouraging them to get to know themselves.
You said curiosity several times and I think I agree that that's a value that artificial intelligence might amplify. What does curiosity mean to you?
For the first time, we have a technology that lets you really follow your curiosity to almost the absolute limit of it. I'm reminded of when I was a kid, I'm sure that you were the same. I would go on interesting research expeditions. I would research ant colonies or I'd research black holes or I'd research how city planning worked and I would follow that interest to extraordinary points. You know, I'd learn aspects of time dilation around black holes or I'd learn about how to implement ant colony simulations on my computer or whatever. I'd indulge my curiosity and it was incredibly fun. And now we have a technology that lets anyone take something they're curious about and kind of take that to the absolute limit. And I think that this is wildly exciting and also good for you. Whatever happens to labor and employment and big changes are surely coming. Being able to exercise your own curiosity and derive satisfaction from that I think is really important. You know, when I was a kid, I didn't have any ambitions that I would be the world's best physicist, right? Or the world's best town planner. I just found this stuff fun to think about and enjoyable. And I think that the more we encourage people to get good at that stuff, the more well set up we'll be for what this technology will bring us.
We're going to return to some of those themes in a second when we talk about AI and the labor force. But I want to get to the news. I think as most listeners know at this point, Anthropic was in a spat with the Pentagon over contract details that ended with the company being designated a supply chain risk. I know that you are extremely limited in what you can say about the details of the case because your company is in active litigation against the Department of Defense or whatever. I hope this question therefore arrives at the right level of altitude for you to be able to answer it. Anthropic has compared artificial intelligence to nuclear weapons on several occasions. This is not a rare analogy. And just most recently in January, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said the Trump administration's decision to allow Nvidia chips, advanced Nvidia chips to be exported to China was quote a bit like, I don't know, like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging, oh yeah, Boeing made the casings end quote. The US does not allow private companies to build nuclear weapons. That is the law. If artificial intelligence is just like nuclear weapons, why should we allow private firms to build it for profit?
AI is fundamentally like everything. It's like a factory that produces cars, micro scooters, animals, and nuclear weapons all at the same time. And the main question that we're going to have to deal with as a society is how do you govern those factories that produce these things? And how do you decide what the appropriate uses are of the things that come out and where they should be used? So, I can't talk obviously about the specifics of our ongoing discussion with the Department of War. I can say that Anthropic was extremely committed to working on national security early because we recognized that AI is going to touch every single part of life and every single part of life is going to have its own range of incredibly thorny difficult issues. So ultimately we're going to need there to be a much larger societal conversation about how we just govern this technology in general. And we will need to reckon with the fact that the technology comes from the private sector and then flows into all of these other sectors. And that's going to be really challenging. It's a thing that we haven't encountered before because previously you didn't have a technology that could take on this ability to become anything. You had specific technologies built by specific industries for specific purposes and that was in many ways simpler.
Just to hit home on the nuclear analogy one more time though because I really want to hear a robust defense of why this is the private sector's job. I mean the nuclear analogy is invoked in so many different ways. It's invoked for export controls. It's invoked for arguments for government detention. It's invoked for arguments about the stakes here being existential or even arguments about the need for international cooperation around the kind of artificial intelligence that's built at the frontier. But one conclusion that this analogy very clearly supports is that private sectors should not control this technology. And so I wonder why the analogy applies almost everywhere except here where it is private sectors developing frontier AI for profit while the government is on the outside attempting to regulate it or develop contract negotiations with it.
I mean I'll push on this in a way but I hope it's helpful. We worked for many years with the National Nuclear Security Administration to actually test out this property of how well could AI understand aspects of nuclear weapons or nuclear technology. And we used that to develop evals and to develop ways of ensuring that we don't proliferate things into the world that have an understanding of nuclear technology. And that's almost a very positive example of how you would have the private sector work with government where some things absolutely should only be the domain of government like nuclear weapons bipartisan area of agreement. Everyone's comfortable with this. The job of a company that is producing a technology that can take on many different aspects is to work out where the areas where it's inappropriate for a company to be deploying that technology like nuclear weapons and then you can work with government to take that capability surface off. So I think that holds some of the path that we're going to have to pursue here and it's one that most of the industry is going down with a few areas including that and biological weapons and other aspects of CBRN.
So to go back to your first answer, I just want to make sure that I understand your perspective here. You're saying the right way to think about this is that AI is this multifarious factory kind of technology where you are creating superpowered Excel charts which is a technology that has no precedent for government regulation but you're also creating technology that can be used by the Pentagon or can be used by individuals to have essentially militaristic or dangerous ends and that is a factor of your invention that does require a different kind of government regulation. And so you're saying the analogy with nuclear weapons is true in so far as it is contained to the parts of your technology that's like nuclear weapons, but you're also doing a lot of other things that have no analogy of nuclear weapons, like say make white collar workers a little bit more productive in their desk jobs.
Yeah. I just pass this out into there's almost two problems here. One is that you have this factory that can produce anything. Then you make sure that what comes out of the factory correlates to what we've decided society can have available in the free market. Not nuclear weapons. Yes, it's fine to produce things that accelerate knowledge workers. And then you have this second question of given the multifaceted nature of what can be produced, how do you then work with government or academia or other parties on the things which you can't necessarily push out to the world in general but have value in the rest of the world. And another example here is biology, right? Where that's less the domain of government, but there are certain parts of biology which have danger if you brought them solely to the general populace but which can massively accelerate the development of biological science in industry. And so you need to work out then what is the path to acceptably getting that in. And so some of the conversation that society is going to have now is what are the appropriate ways we as a society want this technology to be used and how do people decide about what to do with the things in this factory and how to evaluate them and how to proliferate them so society gets the benefit.
Back to jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted on several occasions that AI will destroy half of all entry white collar positions and spike unemployment to as high as 20% which would be the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. This is a near-term prediction. He said this could happen in as soon as 5 years. Do you agree with that forecast?
We're talking about one of the potential things that can happen. And I think it's worth thinking that this is a choice. I don't agree with this because I think it's a choice that we can make. And also my personal view based on the data that I look at is big changes in employment take a long time to filter through to the economy. And even with the magnitude of what we're talking about, you might expect it to take longer. But let's say that there is the potential for massive massive employment changes. I think that this is accompanied innately by the fact that AI must also be growing the economy a lot and causing a lot of economic activity. If that is the case, then you would expect that we can have more degrees of freedom about policy and what we do with this economy. You know, the idea which I return to a lot is if you end up in a situation where employment is being negatively affected by AI in one part of the economy and that correlates to loads of money being generated by the economic activity of the AI systems, you could choose to create many jobs in other parts of the economy like jobs in areas like teaching or nursing where people have a preference for there to be more people working in it. And you could both increase the number of jobs and also do things like cross-sector wage subsidies to improve the wages of those jobs where today we severely undercompensate them.
I wonder what the purpose of talking like this is as a company. I mean it is unusual in corporate history for a company to announce that if its product is successful tens of millions of people will lose their jobs and there's a non-zero chance that we end the human race entirely. Like there is in fact I think no precedent for a private sector company talking about its product like this. I think the analogy that I've reached to before is like Henry Ford would have been within the realm of reality if he said you know if this Model T thing takes off hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die every single decade of car accidents. Like that is true. But Ford and GM did not talk like that in the 1910s and 1920s. What is the strategy of communicating your technology, your product to the American people as a means by which we might have 20% unemployment and a non-zero chance of human catastrophe?
These are not the outcomes we want or anyone in the industry wants. But I think the industry has also learned from looking at the overly rosy predictions made by many in the technology industry before about how the only effects they'd have on the world would be unalloyed positivity. And I think the world lost huge amounts of trust in the technology industry because of that because then they saw that it wasn't only positive things. Social media has caused a range of amazing positives in the world and a range of harms which we're now dealing with. The ethos here and why I'm working on this new initiative for the company called the Anthropic Institute is we want to share a lot more data about what we see in front of us so that society is better prepared for any of the different changes which could come along. We also don't spend enough time talking about all of the really positive changes which I think are a choice that we can make as a civilization and as companies to pursue as well. But it would be negligent of us, I think, to not call out that there are ways that we as a species could get this technology wrong. And I don't think that we're alone in this. If you look at scientists and people that have worked on transformational technologies before in biology or in the early days of nanotechnology, they've all talked about this combination of upsides and risks. It's just that AI as a sector has matured and made a lot more impact on the markets than either of those classes of technology over the same time period. So everything's accentuated.
I hear the argument that you're reacting to the social media experience that social media companies promised in a Pollyannish way to merely connect the world and be a kind of global newspaper and they did not merely connect the world. They did a lot of negative things as well. I hear that argument, but I also look at reality and I look at polling. Like last week, NBC News published a national survey on attitudes toward a range of politicians and institutions. AI's net favorability was -20. That's below every politician that was surveyed in the poll and it's below ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Why do you think people seem to disapprove of and even in some cases seem to hate artificial intelligence despite your efforts to learn from the social media experience?
So we did this project recently called the Claude Interviewer where we talked to something on the order of 80,000 people around the world about their experiences of using our technology, their hopes of their technology, their worries about it. And you saw a couple of interesting things which speaks to this one is that there was a very detectable change in sentiment between what you might think of as people in the developed world and people in kind of the emerging economies. And if you look at the emerging economies or developing world, people had a much more positive view of the technology. This was also true of some economies in East Asia as well where they viewed the technology as part of this larger story of positive economic transformation that could happen to them and could help them improve their lives and better their lives. And then if you look in the developed world, you had much more of a neutral sentiment or negative sentiment which correlates to your polling stuff. Well, I'd say if you look across these two worlds, you have one important factor which is in one the economies have been growing at surprisingly large rates for a long time and in the other the economy has been relatively stagnant. In the stagnant world, which is the developed world, people are appropriately anxious about change. People have been through a lot of change already and seeing AI as another tool of technological change can cause people to feel significant anxiety. And if you look in the developing world, they see change and they're like, great, my story has been one of change and change has mostly correlated to things in my world and material circumstance getting better. So I think that's an important thing to bear in mind. The second part is I think if you look at the polling, you don't see all of these amazing ways that people around the world are using the technology to just allow them to do more or become more themselves. In this Claude Interviewer, we saw examples of someone who was mute using Claude to build a text-to-speech application so they could speak to their friends. Someone who is a security guard using Claude to educate themselves and become someone that worked now in educational technology. There are a range of these examples as well and I'm not solely cherry-picking them. I think what was striking from this was how many examples people had of the ways in which they've used the technology to just meaningfully change aspects of their life or how they relate to people. Finding a way to get more of that and show people that the good that technology can do is something that we in the industry need to do a lot more of. And I think fundamentally the AI industry just needs to help the economy grow a lot to also change sentiment. I think that's the big thing underlying all of this.
I want to go back to that graph that you mentioned from the Anthropic Institute study. I have it right here in front of me. We might be able to throw it up on the screen as well for folks who are viewing on Spotify or YouTube. It indeed shows that the countries and regions that use AI the most and are most developed tend to be most concerned about jobs in the economy. They report the highest negative sentiment toward AI. And it really does seem in one of these charts like there's almost a linear relationship between the regions with the most AI exposure and the most negative sentiment about AI which led me I wrote down two explanations. You added a third. So I'll start by reiterating yours. Your explanation which I don't take as entirely dispositive but one explanation of yours is that the developed world, the richer world has a feeling of zero-sum sentiment because of slowing GDP growth and there is a sense therefore that a technology that increases productivity will not increase productivity for all but will rather increase productivity at the expense of existing workers which is to be clear a prediction or a forecast that your CEO has made explicit. So that's explanation number one is this difference between zero-sum and positive-sum attitudes that might have something to do with GDP growth rates. Explanation number two that I saw from some more full-throated AI boosters is that concern about AI is a quote luxury good. We've all heard this term of luxury goods that essentially people can only afford to be negative about artificial intelligence if they can literally afford it because they're rich. It is a luxury good. Explanation number three is that exposure to AI reduces positive sentiment toward AI overall. And I want to contextualize that latter explanation by bringing in the last thing you said. One of the reasons I find artificial intelligence basically harder to talk about than any other subject I cover on this show is that it's not one thing. For one person, AI is slop on TikTok. For someone in Hollywood, it is threatening their FX job. For someone in research, it's dramatically accelerating the pace by which they do deep research projects or put together Excel or PowerPoint. For someone in science, it is sometimes a frustrating source of misleading information and sometimes an extraordinary source of citing information that they need in order to finish their papers or their grants to the NIH. It's just so many things that the first thing you said is it's a factory that makes everything from scooters to biological weapons. But I would like you to grapple with this final explanation, which is that what if there's something about exposure to this technology that seems to linearly reduce positive sentiment about it.
My best explanation for this is it's about anxiety about the world in general. And I think these things are just increasingly coupled in that AI is like an everything technology which doesn't just touch all of the different types of work that you or I might do in our life, but also touches aspects of things that we don't do in work, like things that we do in a personal level. And thoughts about AI, I think, increasingly trend towards being a proxy for a person's thoughts about the world. And AI contains within itself the world. And you look at this in the polling that we've done. If you look at this in the Claude Interviewer, you can see this in the economic index where actually as usage of AI grows, it just increasingly correlates with generally known facts that you see in other forms of data about people's perception of the world or economic and daily life. So the main lesson I have here is oh the world is feeling very anxious at the moment and we need to figure out a better story for the world and AI is going to be acutely exposed to this because it is a technology that distills all aspects of labor and life into itself and therefore magnifies your anxiety about any of those. We need to show all of the different ways the technology can be used. And we also need to figure out ways that you help people discover that magic from curiosity, that magic from self-betterment, and that magic from using it to change your life. Some of that will probably come from having the technology show up in different ways to people and changing things about the product surfaces, changing things about the user interfaces and also changing what we actually use the technology for as a society.
I want to get to agents and your predictions about the labor force in just a second. But the last question in this zone that occurred to me is that I just wonder if you and other people at Anthropic in the industry live with this kind of tortured ambivalence, this divided soul where on the one hand the very identity of Anthropic is to be founded as a company to ensure the safety of a technology that could be designed in a dangerous way. The only reason to found Anthropic is in the context of against the tension of the possibility that this technology could do extraordinary harm to the world if it's built the wrong way. And at the same time, you're talking about wanting people to feel the magic of the technology as it exists. But it's not one or the other. It's both at the same time. Like the technology does contain within it magic and I think people who have spent tens, hundreds of hours with Claude Code or Claude generally or even ChatGPT may have experienced that magic. And yet at the same time, this is a technology that is clearly within the EA system, within the effective altruist community, within the rationalist community of San Francisco, within the AI community at large, dripping with anxiety about what this thing could be? I mean, so how do you live with that tension, that balance between thinking that you're building something that contains the possibility of magic, but also recognizing sometimes that the only honest way to speak about this technology is to be clear about just how dangerous this thing might be?
We share what we feel about it and also set up things like the institute to share more information so that the rest of the world can work on the problem as well. I don't think though this is unique to AI. Almost 100 years ago or so there was a memo written by the British government worrying about the rise of civilian air travel. And this memo which I'll be able to send you after the show had this dark vision of a world where wars were entirely fought by aircraft and terrorists in aircraft bombing cities and killing people and the whole of life on continental Europe would be disrupted by this and we would live in unimaginable horror and planes should only be kept for government purposes and you shouldn't have them generally distributed because of the harm they could do. Now obviously it got part of it right in that all of those things I just mentioned are done by aircraft today but we also have an entirely changed world due to civilian aircraft and transportation which has
unlocked a vast range of things. So I think the person writing this memo was a civil servant in the English government was doing the same thing that we're doing here of staring at the technology seeing that it encodes within itself some great fantastical power and then worrying a lot about not wanting that to come to pass in a negative way that you can sometimes blind yourself to all of the tremendous upsides that also come along with it. And you know how did we solve planes? Well, you created a very complex overlapping set of regulations from how you build planes to how you regulate transport between different countries to how you build standards for how planes work. The whole practice of making civilian aircraft safe and reliable and be integrated into the world is fiendishly complicated. And also planes sit at the end of supply chains which are almost as complicated as semiconductors and AI and yet the world managed to do it. So I think that what we have in front of us is we can get to this world where AI will be integrated into the world and will have vastly expanded the horizons of what people can do and we have to avoid some of these misuses of the technology which stare us in the face just as like potential misuses of aircraft were obvious to people very shortly after aircraft had started taking flight. So a lot of the feeling I sit with is we've really got to avoid these foreseeable downsides and come up with the technical solutions to avoid them. And we have to get enough of society working on that that we build this very complex interlocking series of safety mechanisms that will allow that to be safe. But we've done it in so many other parts of the world as well.
I want to close the door on these sort of big picture questions about artificial intelligence and the balance between promise and peril here and talk a little bit about the last few months at Anthropic which have been historic months. I feel like we're in a new chapter of artificial intelligence right now and the title of that chapter is the age of agents. You have built, Anthropic has built an agent, Claude Code. OpenAI has built its own agent technology, Codex is the name of its sort of coding agent. Tell me before we talk a little bit about the effect of this technology on the labor force, what is an agent?
