The Fight Over Whose AI Monster Is Scariest
Why Anthropic’s Jack Clark is drawing White House ire
Anthropic’s problem might be that it’s the sober one at the AI rager.
One of its co-founders drew a string of unusual rebukes from the White House this past week after penning a rather personal essay about his own uneasiness around the work his industry is doing.
“Make no mistake: What we are dealing with is a real mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine,” Jack Clark, whose official title at Anthropic is head of policy, wrote on Monday. “And like all the best fairytales, the creature is of our own creation. Only by acknowledging it as being real and by mastering our own fears do we even have a chance to understand it, make peace with it, and figure out a way to tame it and live together.”
Clark’s essay, adapted from a little-noticed conference speech he gave earlier this month, quickly drew condemnation from President Trump’s AI czar, David Sacks, and other tech luminaries, including Marc Andreessen and Keith Rabois.
At the core of the disagreement is a debate around how and whether AI should be regulated. It turns out everyone—on both sides of those questions—is seeing monsters these days. They just don’t agree on whose is scariest.
For the longest time, the popular debate over AI was about trying to prevent the rise of the machine through a “Terminator”-style apocalypse.
Now, the cast of villains has only grown more diverse as the technology has gone from being scientifically interesting to economically useful.
With that, the stakes are higher. If AI fails to live up to its hype, it could be a major blow to the U.S. economy.
Yet living up to the hype might trigger the kinds of bad dreams Clark is warning about. These are unintended consequences from AI that, he says, is increasingly showing signs of being self-aware. And it moves faster than humans can process.
“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks posted on X this past week in response to Clark. “It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”
Anthropic endorsed a first-in-the-nation law that California recently enacted, requiring large AI developers to make public their safety protocols. Supporters say this will create accountability.
In particular, Sacks is worried about the growing number of statehouses looking to regulate the fast-moving technology and he warns that regulations will hinder U.S.’s ability to compete in the AI race with China—another boogeyman.
To Sacks’s point, bills aimed at AI have been introduced this year in all 50 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Clark’s real sin might be working for a company whose CEO once called Trump a “feudal warlord.” Plus, it is seen as carrying on efforts by the Biden administration to advocate for guardrails around AI.
That has locked Anthropic and Sacks in a simmering feud for months—even as other big tech players have gone out of their way to make amends with Trump.
The results seem to have further politicalized the technology. Anthropic’s Claude chatbot is for liberals; Elon Musk’s Grok is for conservatives.
“AI ethics is code for censorship,” Krim Delko, founder of Orange Capital Partners, replied to Sacks’s post.
To underscore how emotional the debate has turned, venture capitalist and Republican backer Peter Thiel has reportedly been warning that global AI regulations could usher in the biggest baddie of them all: the Antichrist.
“In the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science,” Thiel said, according to the Washington Post. “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.”
Is Clark the Antichrist? Well, he’s hardly a Luddite.
For the record, I sat next to him more than a decade ago when we worked at Bloomberg News. Not once did I suspect him of being in league with the devil, though he did wear a lot of black.
Mostly, Clark was a reasonable, earnest guy. Even then, one thing stood out: his extreme interest in the potential of AI. He read scholarly AI research for fun and came to the technology with a deep belief it was going to change the world.
That would take him from journalism to OpenAI and, eventually, Anthropic. It was founded by OpenAI alumni who felt their alma mater wasn’t doing enough to ensure AI safety.
Clark’s profile rose with his ability to bridge the dense, technical world of AI research and the wonky world of public policy. His weekly newsletter, “Import AI,” has become a must-follow for many in the industry.
It’s useful not only for news and analysis, but for Clark’s habit of including his own short-fiction stories about AI. In many ways, he’s drawing inspiration from lyrics of punk-rock band Jawbreaker: My fiction beats the hell out of my truth.
“I write these stories because I’m trying to sort of reckon with the AI stuff happening around us by imagining situations involving it,” Clark once said of his writing.
He has taken his truth to appearances before Congress, the United Nations and elsewhere. After speaking to the Labour Party in the U.K. last year, for example, he talked on a podcast about how he’s learned to communicate his concerns to government leaders.
“I’ve started to say to governments, you should think of AI systems as kind of like countries that are arriving into the world, and misaligned AI systems as like rogue states,” Clark said.
He isn’t advocating for the end of AI but rather pushing for openness so these potential monsters aren’t created in the dark. He’s worried about a crisis—like what happened with the nuclear industry—that sparks drastic policy changes that derails development.
“Right now, I feel that our best shot at getting this right is to go and tell far more people…what we’re worried about,” Clark concluded his essay. “And then ask them how they feel, listen, and compose some policy solution out of it.”