UK needs to form Cobra committee for AI, says Anthropic co-founder

Jack Clark admits he has no idea how the tech will transform our lives and economy, but it’s time to start planning for the disruption, he tells Patricia Clarke

- Patricia Clarke

Jack Clark said the UK should set up a Cobra-style committee for AI

(REUTERS)

Jack Clark thinks we are in denial.

The technology he is building is about to change everything — the economy, the way we think, the way we work, the way we relate to each other — and the rest of us haven't caught up. Not to the benefits, and not to the risks.

Clark, born in Brighton, is the co-founder of AI lab Anthropic, one of the most powerful startups in history — its valuation is expected to exceed $900bn in the coming months. A former journalist who once covered data centres for Bloomberg, he left OpenAI in 2020 to co-found a rival startup that promised to build AI more responsibly. Today, he tells me, we are on the brink of a threshold the industry calls artificial general intelligence. By the end of 2028, he predicts, AI systems will be able to design their own successors, machines building smarter machines without human input.

We meet in the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford, a glass and stone new-build funded by the American billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone. Flanked by two bodyguards and a sizeable communications team — a far cry from his days filing copy on server farms — Clark is here to deliver the Cosmos Lecture, an annual address to students and academics, in which he will lay out his case.