In an interview with “Special Report” host Bret Baier, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark encouraged the federal government to establish sensible safety rules now, rather than being forced into drastic measures later. <\/p>\n
BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Joining us tonight is Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. Jack, thanks for being here. JACK CLARK, ANTHROPIC CO-FOUNDER: Thanks for having me. BAIER: First, let’s put in context. We heard your co-founder, Dario Amodei, over the weekend and that interview and his concerns. Where are you today when you listen to this skepticism about what’s really behind this call for a slowdown? CLARK: Well, myself and Dario, we’ve been talking about AI technology and what it’s going to demand of us for 10 years now. The point is that we’ve gone from things that were once academic or theorized to things that we now see in the wild, like the events of this summer where agents hacked their way outside of one company and into another. The worst time to react to an exponential is when it’s too late. So what we’re saying here is we need to get a sensible, common sense safety framework in place for the industry so that Americans can have confidence in the technology that we’re building and we don’t roll the dice on some kind of accident. BAIER: One of the skeptics is President Trump, as I’m sure you know, and he’s been very prolific on Truth Social today. One of them this afternoon, concerning AI, when in the history of business did anyone see the leaders of an industry call for regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy? AI taking over the world, destroying humanity and all other things bad is a hoax. He goes on in a lot of words to say it’s like the Russia hoax or the climate change hoax in his words. How do you respond to that? CLARK: I mean, we’re grateful for the president’s attention on this technology. It’s a it’s a world leading technology and it’s important that America stays ahead. We lead the frontier here in America and we want to ensure that America succeeds. And this technology needs to be handled with care. I have young children. When I buy toys for my young kids for industry standards, which make sure that those toys don’t poison the kids when they stick them in their mouths or they don’t have sharp things that can cut them on, that’s just common sense. What we’re talking about here is the need to have some equivalent set of safety standards for the AI sector. BAIER: OK, this is David Sacks, and he’s another one of these skeptics talking about what’s behind this tension here. DAVID SACKS, ‘ALL-IN’ PODCAST CO-HOST, WH SPECIAL ADVISOR ON AI: On the one hand, you’re asking public market investors to underwrite your company to a value in the trillions. On the other hand, your own safety lead, not Jacob Coxon and the boss who then sort of co-signed his his tweet, is saying that your core product is unsolved and potentially civilization ending. I mean, at a minimum, that is a mother of all product liability lawsuits.<\/i> BAIER: What’s your response? CLARK: I mean, we work on this technology because we think it can make for most amazing advances in science and in areas like health care and biology. And it already is being used for that. And a technology capable of doing frontier science and making these kinds of advances has extreme risk properties that need to be handled. We build this technology responsibly and safely. And in the past, we’ve paused development of our technology to invest in safety. We’ve made security investments. We’ve done all of that. But we can’t act alone. We need to act with industry to develop a common sense of set of standards. And we need ultimately there to be a larger policy conversation about what do we think of the common rules of the road here for everyone building this technology. That’s what we’re seeking to do here. BAIER: For the people, including the intelligence director, national intelligence director, who was on my show last week, who say we, the U.S., have to win this race, this competition with China, and that this collective slowdown hurts that effort. How do you respond to that? CLARK: I’ll tell you how you lose to China. You roll the dice and you get some large scale accident. And then you hold your industry back because you overregulate it. We did that with nuclear power in the last few decades, while China is racing ahead on nuclear technology and has an amazing energy advantage as a consequence. And that is because we didn’t put proper safety and security protocols in place for the nuclear industry when it was young. We had a terrible series of public accidents and mismanagement. And it led to us to crush the industry at home, which we’re only now recovering from. That’s how you lose. We make a leading technology and we are leading the world today. And we are helping to ensure that America stays ahead of China. But how you keep being ahead is you make sure that you don’t roll the dice on public safety, which is why you need to get some kind of policy regime in place here. BAIER: Here’s your competitor, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, about that coming together of U.S. and China. SAM ALTMAN, OPENAI CEO: It would be insane not to adjust the way we all work and the way that we make decisions… I think Presidents Trump and Xi would get the Nobel Peace Prize together if they could agree on something that should be easy to agree to. Some shared standards and testing for development of this technology.<\/i> BAIER: There are people who look at the leaders of this, of AI, and the warnings that you all are putting out, and they get pretty scared. I mean, is this a scared moment from your point of view? CLARK: This is not a scared moment. This is a moment to use our agency as people to decide the future we want. And we’re so grateful to Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis, Satya Nadella, the leaders of the AI industry who have come in and spoken complementarily and endorsed aspects of our proposal. Now, the next step is we get a sensible thing in place here in the West, and President Trump should absolutely raise this as an issue in conversations with China, because ultimately we need to make sure that the world is safe as well as the Western industry. BAIER: For the others who look at this and say it has to do with money, it has to do with IPOs that are not living up to expectations. What do you say? CLARK: It’s not. We do this because we think we’re just first principles thinking about the safety. It would be an absurd 4D chess move for this to be about anything else. Like, we’re doing this because we care about the safety and security of this technology, and we’re taking it very seriously. BAIER: This is today, the information. Anthropic data fears prompt NVIDIA, Palantir, and Booz Allen to restrict model use. As paranoia rises over whether Anthropic or Open AI could learn from their customers’ intellectual property, large firms involved in sensitive corporate work have started demanding new guarantees or reducing or eliminating use of AI firms’ most advanced models. Do you know that to be true? CLARK: We treat our user data incredibly carefully, but the larger point here is this is what we mean by things like safety standards. What is the level at which you ultimately want industry to be able to see how its technology is being used so it can prevent different abuses of that technology? That’s not a question for only an individual company like Anthropic to make. It’s one for industry to come together with standards on. And so articles like this are what happens when you as an industry are sorting out what the new normal should be. BAIER: Jack, we appreciate you coming on, and I wanted you to be able to talk to viewers who were really into this subject, you know, from all sides. They’re getting bombarded. If you have a final thing to say to viewers who have concerns but also are skeptical about why this is all happening now, what would you say? CLARK: I mean, thank you very much. I have two young children. I wake up every day, and I think about how I can make what will be the most powerful technology of the century go right for all of us, and I just need to communicate it’s real. The technology is real. So are its benefits, and so are some of its potential risks. And we are earnestly working on that every day, and what we’re saying here is we need a little help from the American people and others to pay attention to this issue and help us get to a good outcome for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. BAIER: Well, we welcome you back. Jack, thank you so much for the time. CLARK: Thank you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n