Jack Clark

Jack Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, the AI safety company that develops the Claude family of large-language models, and the author of the Import AI newsletter; previously a Bloomberg technology reporter and OpenAI's policy lead.
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8 min read
Jack Clark

Jack Clark

Jack Clark is a British AI policy expert, former technology journalist, and a co-founder of Anthropic, the public-benefit corporation that develops the Claude family of large-language models. He writes the Import AI newsletter, an AI research and policy publication he started in 2016 that crossed 100,000 free subscribers in 2025. As of May 2026, he serves as Anthropic's Head of Public Benefit and leads the Anthropic Institute, the in-house think tank announced in March 2026 to study the societal, economic, and security impacts of frontier AI.

At a glance

Origins

Clark grew up in the United Kingdom and studied English literature with creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, completing the Bachelor of Arts degree in 2009. The literature background is unusual among AI-lab co-founders, almost all of whom hold degrees in computer science, physics, mathematics, or engineering. Clark has discussed the choice publicly, including in a Fortune profile from April 2026 where he described the program as good preparation for analyzing AI policy because it teaches "synthesis across a whole variety of subjects."

After university he moved into technology journalism, covering distributed systems, quantum computing, and machine-learning research at The Register before joining Bloomberg, where he covered the technology industry from the San Francisco bureau. The Bloomberg posting placed him at the publication's Big Tech beat in the period when modern deep-learning research was beginning to attract sustained business-press coverage.

Career

Clark's path into AI began at the December 2015 NeurIPS conference in Montreal. By his own account on the Import AI about page, he met a Berkeley professor on the flight to the conference who promised an introduction to the team that would soon launch OpenAI. A few months later he left Bloomberg to join the new lab as one of its earliest non-research hires, with responsibilities spanning strategy, communications, and policy. He stayed at OpenAI for more than four years, eventually serving as the company's Policy Director.

In December 2020 he left OpenAI alongside Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Sam McCandlish, Jared Kaplan, and Chris Olah. The group formally incorporated Anthropic as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation in early 2021, with Clark taking the Head of Policy role. The first public Claude model launched in March 2023, and Anthropic has shipped successive Claude generations through Claude Opus 4.7 in April 2026.

Through the 2021-to-2025 period, Clark was Anthropic's primary policy spokesperson with the US government, the UK AI Safety Institute, and the European Commission. He testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in September 2022 on US leadership in emerging compute technologies, before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in February 2024, and before the House Select Committee on the CCP in June 2025 at the "Algorithms and Authoritarians: Why U.S. AI Must Lead" hearing on Chinese frontier AI and US compute export controls.

In March 2026, Anthropic announced the Anthropic Institute, an in-house think tank combining the Frontier Red Team, Societal Impacts, and Economic Research groups, with Clark transitioning from Head of Policy to Head of Public Benefit and taking leadership of the Institute. The Institute remit covers forecasting AI progress, the intersection of AI and the legal system, and the economic impacts of frontier deployment. In parallel, Clark has continued to publish Import AI on a weekly cadence as one of the most widely read English-language AI newsletters by professional researchers and policymakers.

Affiliations

Notable contributions

Clark's body of work is concentrated on AI policy publication, government testimony, and external-facing communications for Anthropic, with a single co-author credit on one of the most-cited papers of the modern AI era.

  • Import AI newsletter (since 2016). Weekly research-and-policy newsletter covering frontier AI papers, capability releases, and policy developments. Clark announced in 2025 that the publication had crossed 100,000 free subscribers. Industry coverage and academic citations frequently identify Import AI as the most consistent long-form AI policy publication in operation, with the back catalog now spanning nearly a decade of weekly issues.
  • "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" (May 2020). The 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 paper led by Tom Brown, with Clark among the named co-authors. The paper has accumulated more than 80,000 citations and is one of the most influential AI publications of the past decade.
  • AI Index at Stanford HAI (founding member and co-chair, 2017 to 2024). Clark was a founding member of the AI Index, the annual Stanford-coordinated report tracking AI capabilities, investment, and policy worldwide, and presented the 2022 AI Index Report in a Stanford HAI weekly seminar.
  • Congressional testimony. Three appearances before US committees: the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in September 2022; the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in February 2024; and the House Select Committee on the CCP in June 2025.
  • Anthropic Institute (March 2026). Clark leads the Institute as Head of Public Benefit, consolidating the Frontier Red Team, Societal Impacts, and Economic Research teams under a single research umbrella.
  • National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC, 2021 to 2024). Inaugural member of the US committee chartered by the Department of Commerce to advise the president on AI matters; the 27-member committee was named in April 2022.
  • Public-talk record. "AI, policy, and the weird sci-fi future with Anthropic's Jack Clark" on the Anthropic YouTube channel in September 2024; "Jack Clark on AI's Uneven Impact" on Tyler Cowen's Conversations with Tyler (Episode 242, May 2025); regular appearances on NPR's Planet Money and other policy-focused outlets in 2026.

Investments and boards

  • Anthropic (AI): Co-founder, Head of Public Benefit, and head of the Anthropic Institute, 2021 to present. Public Benefit Corporation incorporated in Delaware. Approximately $73 billion cumulative funding through the February 2026 Series G at a $380 billion post-money valuation.

No public personal angel-investor activity on record outside the Anthropic operating role in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026. Coverage including the Entrepreneur magazine profile has characterized Clark as having reached billionaire status through the Anthropic equity position rather than disclosed transactions.

Network

Clark's longest-running professional relationships are with his six fellow Anthropic co-founders, all of whom he worked with at OpenAI before the 2021 founding: Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer; Daniela Amodei, the president, who works closely with him on policy and external relations; Tom Brown, the Chief Compute Officer and lead author of the GPT-3 paper on which Clark is a co-author; Sam McCandlish, a research-leadership co-founder; Jared Kaplan, the chief science officer; and Chris Olah, the interpretability research lead.

His broader OpenAI co-author network includes Greg Brockman, the OpenAI president and a GPT-3 co-author; Ilya Sutskever; Mira Murati; and John Schulman, who later joined Anthropic in 2024. The Stanford HAI, NAIAC, OECD, and CSET roles connect him to senior US and international AI policy staff.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Clark is the Anthropic spokesperson most frequently cited in industry coverage on AI policy, US-government engagement, and the societal-impact research that the Anthropic Institute now coordinates. The Head of Public Benefit role consolidates a remit that spans public communications, congressional testimony, regulatory engagement, and research management over economists, social scientists, and the Frontier Red Team.

His career path is structurally distinctive among the Anthropic founding cohort. Where the other six co-founders entered AI through doctoral research, machine-learning engineering, or self-directed technical work, Clark entered through technology journalism. The literature-and-creative-writing degree is the only humanities degree among the seven Anthropic co-founders. Industry coverage of his policy work consistently emphasizes the long-form essay and newsletter cadence rather than the conference-keynote and academic-talk pattern of his peers.

The Import AI newsletter is the structural anchor of his public profile. The near-decade of weekly issues since 2016 gives Clark an unusual public footprint for a frontier-lab co-founder: a body of commentary on capability releases, policy events, and research papers that is widely read inside the policy community. The combination of Import AI, the Stanford HAI AI Index founding role, the NAIAC inaugural appointment, three rounds of congressional testimony, and the Anthropic Institute leadership places Clark among the most visible AI policy practitioners associated with a frontier lab as of May 2026.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

  • Anthropic Institute output. The first major research publications from the Institute under Clark's leadership, including quantitative work on AI's economic impact, frontier-capability forecasting reports, and analyses of the AI-and-legal-system intersection.
  • Mythos and government engagement. Clark's role in public communications around the Mythos model and the structure of Anthropic's relationships with US executive-branch agencies through the second Trump term.
  • Import AI cadence. Whether the weekly newsletter cadence continues at the historical level alongside the expanded Anthropic operating remit.
  • Successor congressional testimony. Future testimony before House and Senate committees; Clark's three-committee record from 2022 to 2025 makes him a likely repeat witness in the 2026 to 2027 Congress.
  • Pentagon and export-control policy. Anthropic's posture on the Pentagon supply-chain dispute and on US-China compute export controls, where Clark's June 2025 testimony established the company's public position.
  • Public profile cadence. Whether the cross-podcast appearances (Conversations with Tyler, Anthropic's own channel, NPR Planet Money) continue to expand or remain at the current level given the Public Benefit role.

Sources

Person Anthropic
About the author
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