PERSON
Jack Clark
The co-founder of Anthropic, author of Import AI, and the figure who insists most clearly that what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature—not a simple machine—and that our only chance of governing it lies in seeing it clearly enough to measure it honestly.
Jack Clark is that rare figure at the AI frontier who is simultaneously deeply optimistic and deeply afraid, and who refuses to let either feeling win. He co-founded Anthropic in 2021 alongside Dario and Daniela Amodei, after serving as policy director at OpenAI during the years when the organisation was discovering that throwing dramatically larger amounts of computation at relatively simple architectures would yield surprising and general capabilities. He was present for the early arc of the GPT line and has described the emotion of that period as fright: they were, he has said, a little frightened by what they could see coming. Since 2016 he has written Import AI, a weekly newsletter that has become the closest thing the field has to a shared memory—a running ledger of what is actually happening rather than a celebration of what the press release says is happening. He helped found the
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