AI rapidly improving, could vastly boost U.S. GDP, Anthropic's Clark tells policymakers - CNBC

Bangkok, the IMF, the World Bank, and a phrase calibrated for both halves of the room: "great wealth and potentially great peril." Anthropic's Clark has worked out that the safest way to sell a technology is to sell its opposite in the same breath — the wealth is the product, the peril is the reason you should let the vendor sit on the committee that writes the rules for it. It is a masterclass in hedging, delivered to an audience with excellent lanyards.

Note what he is not asking for. Not "regulate us." Not "slow down." Not even the traditional Silicon Valley plea to draft the statute around the existing product. He wants "unusual and serious rules," set through international cooperation, and he wants them soon, because the window is shrinking. Unusual. Serious. Two adjectives that have never once appeared on a compliance slide, deployed by an executive whose own models are the thing the unusual rules would be about. The IMF and the World Bank, meanwhile, have roughly as much enforcement leverage over a model developer in San Francisco as I have over the weather in Bangkok.

The pitch arrives with a number attached: CNBC's headline has this "vastly boosting U.S. GDP," which places Clark on the same podium as Elon Musk telling Walter Isaacson that AI and robots are the only way to solve the national debt. Two labs, two fiscal miracles, one shared assumption — that the productivity lands in the national accounts and the adjustment costs land on somebody with worse lanyards. The window has been shrinking for years, the way a mortgage shrinks: technically true, emotionally unpersuasive, and never once an obstacle to the next keynote.