Anthropic’s founder confirms that the company informed the Trump administration about Mythos
Jack Clark, one of the founders of Anthropic who also serves as the Head of Public Benefits of Anthropic PBC, confirmed that the AI company informed the Trump administration about its new Mythos model.
The model, which was announced last week, is so dangerous that it is not released to the public, mainly because of its alleged cyber security capabilities.
In an interview at the Semafor World Economy conference this week, Clark explained why the company is still cooperating with the US government while suing them.
In March, Anthropic filed a lawsuit against Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) after the agency called the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic had been at loggerheads with the Pentagon over whether the military should have unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI systems for use in crimes involving mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. (OpenAI ended up winning the deal instead.)
At the conference, Clark downplayed management’s labeling of their business as a procurement risk, saying it was a “small contract dispute” and that Anthropic didn’t want it to detract from the fact that the company cares about national security.
“Our position is that the government should know about this, and we should find new ways for the government to work with private companies that are doing things that really transform the economy, but that will have aspects that affect national security, equality, and so on,” said Clark. “So, we talked to them about the Mythos, and we’ll talk to them about the next models.”
His confirmation comes after reports last week that Trump officials were encouraging banks to test Mythos, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley.
Clark also addressed other aspects of AI’s impact on society during the interview, including things like unemployment and higher education.
In the past, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI advances could bring unemployment to Depression-era numbers, but Clark slightly disagrees. He explained in the interview that Amodei believes that AI will become more powerful than people expect very quickly, so he uses that as a basis for his estimates.
Clark, who leads the team of economists at Anthropic, said the company so far sees “some potential weakness in graduate employment” across selected industries. He noted that Anthropic is ready in case of major employment shifts, however.
Pushed to say what college majors today should pursue or avoid, given the implications of AI, Clark can only suggest that the most important majors are those that “involve integration across a variety of disciplines and analytical thinking about that.”
“That’s because the AI that allows us to do it allows you to be able to find a certain amount of subject matter experts in different domains,” Clark said. “But the most important thing is to know the right questions to ask and to have ideas about what can be interesting when you collide with different opinions in many different fields.”
