Anthropic co-founder confirms the company briefed the Trump administration on Mythos
Jack Clark, one of Anthropic’s co-founders and also head of Public Benefit for Anthropic PBC, confirmed that the AI company has informed the Trump administration about its new Mythos model.
The model, announced last week, is so dangerous that it is not being released to the public, largely due to its alleged powerful cybersecurity capabilities.
In an interview at the Semafor World Economy Summit this week, Clark explained why the company was still involved with the US government while suing them.
In March, Anthropic filed a lawsuit against Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) after the agency labeled the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic had clashed with the Pentagon over whether the military should have unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI systems for use cases such as mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. (OpenAI ultimately won the deal.)
At the conference, Clark downplayed how the government framed its operations as a supply chain risk, saying it was only a “minor contract dispute” and that Anthropic didn’t want that to get in the way of the company’s commitment to national security.
“Our position is that the government needs to be aware of this, and we need to find new ways for the government to work with a private sector that is making things that will really revolutionize the economy, but that will have aspects that touch on national security, equities and others,” Clark said. “So absolutely, we’ve talked to them about Mythos, and we’ll talk to them about the next models as well.”
His confirmation comes next reports last week that Trump officials encouraged banks to test Mythos, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.
Clark also discussed other aspects of AI’s impact on society during the interview, including issues like unemployment and higher education.
Previously, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI advancements could lead to unemployment to figures from the depression erabut Clark somewhat disagrees. He explained in the interview that Amodei believes AI will very soon become much more powerful than people expect, so he uses that as a basis for his estimates.
Clark, who leads a team of economists at Anthropic, said the company so far sees only “some potential weakness in employment for young graduates” in certain sectors. He noted that Anthropic is ready in case major employment shifts occur.
Pushed to say which majors students today should pursue or avoid, due to the impact of AI, Clark would only broadly suggest that the most important majors are those that “involve a synthesis across a range of topics and analytical thinking about them.”
“That’s because AI allows us to access any number of experts in different domains,” says Clark. “But the most important thing is that you know what questions to ask and that you have intuitions about what would be interesting if you collided different insights from many different disciplines.”
