Jack Clark, Anthropic’s co-founder and Head of Public Benefit, confirmed that the AI company has briefed the Trump administration regarding its new Mythos model.
Announced last week, the Mythos model is considered "too dangerous" for public release, primarily due to its alleged powerful cybersecurity capabilities.
During an interview at this week's Semafor World Economy summit, Clark elucidated why Anthropic continues to engage with the U.S. government even while simultaneously pursuing a lawsuit against them.
In March, Anthropic filed a lawsuit against Trump's Department of Defense (DOD) after the agency labeled the company a supply-chain risk. This dispute stemmed from Anthropic’s clash with the Pentagon over whether the military should have unrestricted access to its AI systems for uses such as mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. (OpenAI ultimately secured the deal instead.)
At the conference, Clark downplayed the administration's "supply-chain risk" label as merely a "narrow contracting dispute," asserting that Anthropic did not want this to overshadow the company's commitment to national security.
"Our position is the government has to know about this stuff, and we have to find new ways for the government to partner with a private sector that is making things that are truly revolutionizing the economy, but are going to have aspects to them which hit National Security, equities, and other ones," Clark stated. "So absolutely, we talked to them about Mythos, and we’ll talk to them about the next models as well."
This confirmation follows earlier reports last week that Trump officials were encouraging major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, to test Mythos.
Clark also addressed AI's broader societal impact during the interview, touching upon issues like unemployment and higher education.
While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously warned that AI advancements could lead to unemployment rates comparable to the Great Depression, Clark offered a slightly different perspective. He clarified that Amodei bases his estimations on the belief that AI will rapidly become far more powerful than generally anticipated.
Clark, who leads a team of economists at Anthropic, noted that the company has thus far observed only "some potential weakness in early graduate employment" across select industries. However, he affirmed Anthropic's preparedness for potential significant employment shifts.
When pressed to advise college students on which majors to pursue or avoid given AI's impacts, Clark broadly suggested that the most crucial fields are those that "involve synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that."
He elaborated, "That’s because what AI allows us to do is it allows you to have access to sort of an arbitrary amount of subject matter experts in different domains."