Jack Clark
Co-founder & Head of Policy, Anthropic
About
Jack Clark is co-founder and Head of Policy at Anthropic. Before co-founding Anthropic in 2021, he served as Policy Director at OpenAI. A former technology journalist at Bloomberg News and The Register, Clark bridges the technical and policy worlds of AI. He publishes Import AI, a weekly newsletter read by over 70,000 subscribers, and has been a founding member of Stanford's AI Index and an inaugural member of the U.S. National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC). In 2023, he briefed the first UN Security Council meeting on AI threats to global peace.
Key Contributions
- Co-founded Anthropic after policy roles at OpenAI, putting governance work inside a frontier-model company
- Writes Import AI, a long-running newsletter that translates technical AI progress into policy and strategy signals
- Helped build Stanford's AI Index into a reference point for tracking AI capabilities, investment, and policy trends
- Served on the U.S. National AI Advisory Committee, connecting frontier-lab experience to public-sector AI governance
- Briefed the UN Security Council's first session on AI risks in 2023, helping frame AI as a global security issue
- Also illustrates a recurring tension: AI policy leaders often warn about race dynamics while working inside companies racing at the frontier
Videos & Interviews
How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? | The Ezra Klein Show
Ezra Klein and Jack Clark discuss the shift from chatbots to AI agents and their economic impact
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The weird AI future: A conversation with Anthropic's Jack Clark
Discussion on AI policy, the economy, and the emerging sci-fi future of AI
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Dario Amodei
CollaboratedCEO & Co-founder, Anthropic
Clark ran policy at OpenAI while Amodei ran research; both appear on the GPT-3 author list, and both left in 2021 among Anthropic's seven founders. What makes the pairing worth reading is the division of labor it created — Amodei arguing the exponential in essays and testimony, Clark translating it weekly in Import AI for the people who write the rules. Governance here is not an external check on the lab; it is staffed from inside it.
arxiv.org · en.wikipedia.org
Ted Chiang
KindredScience Fiction Author
A pairing across a fence: Clark writes short science fiction inside Import AI, his policy newsletter, and lists writing those stories among his hobbies; Chiang writes the fiction that has done more than any argument to make people think carefully about machine minds. Both reached for stories because the honest form of the question — what is it like to live beside this — resists being turned into a forecast. They would answer it very differently, which is the point.
