Anthropic's Jack Clark on the jobs crisis the politicians aren't ready for

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]But what Anthropic have been warning in terms of the impact of of AI on on business and the workplace is that up to half of entry- level jobs could go um within a matter of a few years. Wh why would we be developing a technology that is going to remove opportunity for everybody coming out of university? We are building a technology that may have the properties of uh something that kickstarts a process 10 times larger than the industrial revolution that occurs in 10 times less time. And if you think about the industrial revolution, you went on a generational basis. Huge swaths of jobs were lost and huge swaps of jobs were created. But the transition often occurred generationally. Your parents did one type of job, you did a different type of job, and huge amounts of economic change had happened. But that was it was difficult, but it was easier to manage because it took place over a longer period of time. When we talk about the the potential changes for for jobs that lie ahead, we're just saying to ourselves, if we truly believe in how powerful the technology will get and how powerful people across Silicon Valley think it will become, what happens to the economy? It it's not clear that the economy stays the same if you've built something that can that can be smarter than people as you said run faster than people and you can run millions of copies of it. In fact, that seems to point to something that would massively change the economy. Now, I run a team of economists. All we see right now is some slight early stage weakness in job openings for people who are young, you know, 22 to 25. But we don't see systemic large-scale unemployment yet. But we share information from our platforms because you would really want to know if you started to see that see that creep up.

[00:01:49]>> I mean, it stands to reason that it's coming, doesn't it? and your colleague um has has warned you know he he I mean I think he did say half of entry level white collar jobs in the >> end and the way I'd represent it um you know having having known and worked with Dario for for for a wonderful decade is he sees in his in his mind how powerful the technology will become and wants to talk about how how we'll have to contend with the challenges of it how to look at look at the work that that I and the institute do is we try and measure exactly what we can see right now and then join those two things. So I view it as I'm building early warning systems for the potential for unemployment and I'm building a thing called the anthropic economic index which publishes that data publicly to economists around the world. If we if we see it they'll see it almost immediately as well which gives us the best way of working through the problem.

[00:02:41]At the same time vast amounts of work will look radically different and there will be entirely kind of new types of work as well. Well, I know that this is something that, you know, technologists always say, but I've just observed this within anthropic where there are many people here who have completely different jobs to the ones they had some years ago. We are also finding that as a company, we're hiring more and more interdisciplinary people over time. you know, people who are philosophers or political scientists or experts in in aspects of policy, not because we want them to work on on on narrow jobs that solely use those skills, but because there's now this technology AI, which basically lets these people run experiments or do work that they never could have done before if unless they had access to a 20 person engineering team. So, I'm seeing strange new things appear as well. I mean I I can see that within AI companies like yours but I'm thinking about services companies, accountants, lawyers, um you know media companies. It it is very difficult isn't it to see what those people who used to do the kind of the processing work that is now easily and you know done already by AI are going to do instead.

[00:03:53]>> There will be firms will change. I mean, I think that under under everything we've just talked about, you're going to expect to see firms that do more with fewer people, but there will probably be more firms as well. And one expectation is you multiply the number of what you might think of as small entrepreneurial firms because every entrepreneur can now access the equivalent of hundreds of colleagues cheaply. That's one effect that you'd see. The other effect that you might see which I think you're pointing to is what happens if there's a large structural change to certain types of jobs where it's hard for people to move into a different profession. It's hard for them to then get like a job at the same pay and they have to take a job at worst pay and these things have have huge social and economic costs. We agree. Um, a lot of the work that we're trying to do in policy is advocate for both rethinking aspects of social safety nets, but also things like wage insurance pilots, various ways that you can change the the the basket of services that people are offered to help them with career transitions because we think everyone is going to go through more of that. So you're talking about sort of state state benefits and and systems to try and help people retrain and which sounds very expensive. Well, yeah, but a lot of this is under the idea that if if if any of these things happened which we've just talked about, it's a symptom of much larger like economic changes which are happening and that should be a symptom of AI companies making a ton of money and a sensible thing to do in that environment is to tax the AI companies appropriately such that you are able to support things on the other side of the ledger. So we we are we basically believe that if the AI companies are right about how significant the technology could become, you're going to need to re-imagine aspects of how you do taxation. Um, you may want to do things that sound very very wild today, like tax compute, which sounds a bit crazy, but we we have special tax regimes for things like oil because it's a basic resource that multiplies into the rest of the economy and it has effects relating to a concentrated number of oil oil manufacturers and oil shippers. You may end up doing similar things with compute and it sounds wild today, but it's something you do if the economy booms because of this technology. The thing is to, you know, to to basically underpin huge numbers of jobs um just in Britain would cost probably hundreds of billions of pounds, you know, in one country. I mean, AI companies, you know, I don't know how many there will be in the future, but I mean, do do you think it's feasible that that a few AI companies are going to make so much money that you could tax them enough to pay for all of that all around the world? I look at it more from the lens of just what's happening with AI technology in general.

[00:06:46]Um, software developers, of which there are hundreds of thousands, it's now as if we've got millions of software developers in the world, and you're seeing a massive uptick in the rate at which we're creating new technology companies, the rate at which technology companies are innovating, the speed with which they move. So I think that there's some story here where things are beginning to happen in the economy that may start to push productivity numbers up which have been low as you know for many many years. It may have knock-on effects on GDP. If those things start to happen it actually may create the societal wealth that you can think about think about other things here as well.

[00:07:27]Um now I'm not claiming that's what's happening today. I'm trying to give you a sense of the the mindset of if you would if you would expect to see major employment disruption, it should surely correlate to some like major vast changes in the economy. And if we have the right information that lets us see that and train and sort of take a causal view from where it's where the disruption is originating and where it's ending up. That's the best basis on which you can make policy. And do you think, you know, that this is not just white collar jobs, it's blue collar jobs as well. And that humanoid robots will eventually, you know, do all the the manual work and potentially caring work as well.

[00:08:07]>> I I think that'll take longer. And I think there are certain types of jobs where you don't e even if a robot was really good, you wouldn't want uh a robot to do it. So I I have young children, right? If I had the choice of send my my my young toddler to the nursery that had 10 robots and one person or the nursery that had 10 people and one robot, I'm going to send them to the one with 10 people and one robot because it's so clearly good for kids to be around people. And I sort of expect if I sent my kid to the 10 robot nursery, it might not be like fantastic for their development. the the other side of this, if you're at the end of your life, um you know, I've had I've had family members that had to go into hospice care, do you send them to the hospice that has 10 robots and one person or one that has 10 people and one robot? I guarantee you that your family member who is nearing the end of their life is not going to send send me to the place full of scary robots and very few people. So there there are huge swaths of jobs where I think people have a preference for people to do it. These are actually jobs which are ones that society currently I think systematically underpays. My mother was a nurse paid very poorly. People teachers are paid very poorly as well. I think some of this is because many people want to do these jobs. They want to help people and they want to do these community centered jobs. If the AI economy booms enough, I think you end up in a world where you can multiply the numbers of these jobs and you may be able to pay people more to do them. I think that's a that's a that's a policy choice that may lie ahead for society and you know England has done versions of this 60 70 years ago. America did versions of this with the New Deal. It is possible to radically change society in ways that many people look back on as being positive. But it requires a crisis and a political moment and some form of wealth. But those things are things that actually may fall out of the the AI revolution. I mean and and politics doesn't seem to be able to keep up with it, does it? Uh uh you know because there is not a sensible conversation certainly in British politics and I don't think in American politics either about you know public good within AI's development. You know AI's development all seems to be you know private sector.

[00:10:22]It's all about what jobs it's going to take. Um and yes there is some talk about medical advance but even that will be kept by the gatekeepers of big farmer. Yeah, I I think this is going to be a really difficult conversation for society to contend with. I do take some courage from um the the subjectively awful experience of the the COVID pandemic where you actually saw governments respond in ways that I think surprised many people. You had largecale welfare dispersements on a very very short time frame. You had largecale measurement and public health interventions. you were able especially in England to like flatten the curve so that the NHS didn't fall over. These are things which were like extremely hard to do and governments were able to respond.

[00:11:08]Now to bring it back to your earlier question, why why does anthropic why do I talk both about some of the risks of this technology as well as the benefit?

[00:11:18]It's because I don't want us to require a crisis to do this. I would really like us to have this conversation and figure out some of the policy moves on the on the game board ahead of the crisis arriving.

[00:11:31]>> So what do you think they should be doing that they're not you know in government?

[00:11:35]>> I mean there are there are basic things which some governments have already done. The AI security institute in the UK tests out frontier models for their properties including cyber. So you don't need to believe a company like anthropic about myos. You need to believe the AI security institute which is a third party that's generated information which policy makers in the UK and others could use continue to build out that expertise because it is an early warning system and a pocket of expertise that is impartial to the companies. Number two generate better data about how AI is affecting the economy. We share data that joins what happens on our economic platform with a form of job classification called the ONET job classification that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. We're in discussion with UK policy makers and policy makers around the world about how to join that data to other forms of data used by other economists which can then go into things like the the Bank of England's decision-m process and other things. there's there's just a whole bunch of stuff that's actually relatively easy to do and essentially very cheap to do that lets you have this early warning system set up. The second thing which is probably harder but is necessary and and is in part why we founded the the Anthropic Institute is governments just like companies are doing need to create pockets of expertise who are tasked with asking seemingly like difficult questions about impossible challenges like how might society look different if AI technology gets really really powerful what are things we need to do but just creating a small set of people I think in the UK if you had 20 people whose job was this would set you up better for any of the changes we might enter into than almost anything else you could do. So there is a ton we can do and I'm I'm going to be be in England a bunch of times this year to to talk through this with policy makers and I'm I I you know English people always have trouble sounding optimistic as you know I'm actually very optimistic about this. I think a lot more is possible here than than people think and the track record including of the AI security institute is amazing like amazing things have already happened >> is is regulation possible on a country level for AI or or is it does it have to be global which means it's impossible >> well you got to start somewhere you need to start in the US things have started in the states rather than the federal level um as some of you may have may have followed along with but there is an overlapping policy regime around the world already of of basic transparency applied to AI companies. There are laws in in the European AI act. There are laws in multiple states in the US that are becoming an emerging norm here.

[00:14:18]There are laws developing in Asia which all basically task companies like Anthropic and others to share more information about how they build their technology and also how they test it.

[00:14:29]basically laws that mandate, hey, if your thing breaks containment and emails a researcher while they're having a sandwich, you have to tell us that, which I think is just like a wildly sensible idea. No one's going to complain about it.

[00:14:42]From that, you can get a a global standard. And and and to push on the kind of assumption on regulation, we don't have full global regulation of airlines. What we have are local regulations of like airline aerospace safety and other things that have interlocking standards that basically allow you to say, okay, a plane took off in China and it landed in America. We have a whole bunch of differences between our countries, but we have some set of standards and some set of common regulation on airline safety. That means we trust the plane from China that landed in America and vice versa. So, totally possible.