Anthropic co-founder: ‘The most powerful technology ever built’
Anthropic co-founder: ‘The most powerful technology ever built’
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/06/24/anthropic-co-founder-the-most-powerful-technology-ever-built/
Publish Date: 2026-06-24 11:00:00
Source Domain: reason.com
Today’s guest is Jack Clark. He’s the co-founder of Anthropic—the artificial intelligence company behind Claude—and the head of its newly launched Anthropic Institute, a forum designed to think through the philosophical, political, and practical challenges that AI poses to society.
Nick Gillespie talks with Clark, a former tech journalist at Bloomberg and The Register, about his company’s ongoing regulatory battles with the Trump administration; whether Anthropic should have held back Mythos, its superpowerful version, from general release; and what might happen if and when AI becomes fully capable of “recursive self-improvement,” or the ability to build itself without human input.
They also talk about libertarian and market-based regulatory systems for the internet and tech sector and whether those would yield better outcomes than the ones we’ve seen so far from the European Union and other conventional governing bodies.
0:00—The promise of artificial intelligence
3:50—Overcoming AI hallucinations and sycophancy
5:08—Military applications of AI
9:38—Anthropic’s red lines on mass surveillance and fully automated weapons
14:23—Lessons from the 1990s
16:12—Oversight and regulation of AI technology
23:07—Navigating politics through policy ambiguity
33:31—How does U.S. governance affect global AI policy?
36:42—What is recursive self-improvement?
43:35—How does Clark’s literature and journalism background inform his views on AI?
45:43—The liberating aspects of technology
51:15—The effects of AI on employment
Producer: Paul Alexander
Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Jack Clark. He’s the co-founder of Anthropic, and he’s one of the most influential figures in AI policy. We are going to talk about the government clampdown on Anthropic in particular…
