Jack Clark, an Anthropic co-founder who also serves as head of public benefit at Anthropic PBC, confirmed that the AI company briefed the Trump administration on the new Mythos model.
The model, announced last week, is so dangerous that it has not been released to the public, largely due to its allegedly strong cybersecurity capabilities.
In an interview in Semaphore Summit on the World Economy This week, Clark explained why the company continued to do business with the US government while simultaneously suing it.
Last March, Anthropic filed a lawsuit against Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) after the agency designated the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic has clashed with the Pentagon over whether the military should have unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI systems for use cases that include mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. (OpenAI ended up winning the deal instead.)
At the conference, Clark downplayed management’s classification of its business as a supply chain risk, saying it was just a “narrow contractual dispute” and that Anthropic did not want to get in the way of the fact that the company cares about national security.
“Our position is that the government has to know these things, and we have to find new ways for the government to partner with the private sector that makes things that really revolutionize the economy, but will have aspects that are detrimental to national security and stocks and so forth,” Clark said. “And of course, we talked to them about the Mythos, and we’ll talk to them about the next models as well.”
Its confirmation comes later Reports Last week, Trump officials were encouraging banks to test Mythos, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.
Clark also addressed other aspects of AI’s impact on society during the interview, including things like unemployment and higher education.
Previously, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that advances in artificial intelligence could lead to unemployment For Depression-era numbersBut Clark is a little different. He explained in the interview that Amodei believes that AI will become much more powerful than people expect very quickly, so he uses that as the basis for his estimates.
Clark, who leads a team of economists at Anthropic, said the company had so far only seen “some potential weakness in early graduate employment” across select industries. He noted that Anthropic is prepared in the event of major shifts in employment.
When forced to say what majors today’s college students should pursue or avoid, as a result of the effects of AI, Clark suggested that in general only the most important majors are those that “involve synthesis across the full range of subjects and thinking analytically about that.”
“That’s because what AI allows us to do is it allows you to access a random number of experts who specialize in different fields,” Clark said. “But the really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having an intuition about what will be interesting if you collide with different insights from many different disciplines.”
