Jack Clark

Jack Clark (born around 1987) is a British technology journalist turned AI executive who cofounded Anthropic and serves as its head of policy. Before Anthropic he was policy director at OpenAI, and before that a reporter covering computing and artificial intelligence for outlets including The Register and Bloomberg. He co-chairs Stanford's AI Index, writes the widely read Import AI newsletter, and has become one of the most visible industry voices in AI governance.¹²

Journalism

Clark was born in Brighton, England, grew up around London during the early personal-computing era, and studied liberal arts, taking a bachelor's degree centered on English literature and creative writing rather than a technical field, a background he has cited in arguing that the AI era rewards people who can ask the right questions over those who can only code. He entered technology journalism covering enterprise infrastructure, distributed systems, supercomputers, and machine learning. He worked for the British technology publication The Register, writing in detail about data centers and emerging neural-network research, before joining Bloomberg as a technology reporter around 2015, where he built a beat on artificial intelligence and was for a period the outlet's dedicated AI reporter.²³

His reporting put him in contact with the research community at the moment deep learning was breaking into the mainstream, and he covered the field as a journalist before deciding to work inside it. He has continued writing in a journalistic mode throughout his industry career through Import AI, a weekly newsletter he began in 2016 that summarizes and analyzes new AI research and is read by tens of thousands of subscribers across the field and in government.²³

OpenAI

In 2016 Clark left Bloomberg to join OpenAI, where he ran strategy and communications and rose to become the organization's policy director. In that role he managed the company's public messaging and its engagement with governments, and he was involved in some of OpenAI's early decisions about how to release powerful models, including the staged 2019 rollout of GPT-2 that withheld the full model on stated misuse concerns, an episode that became an early test case in debates over AI release norms.¹⁴

Clark was also a founding member of Stanford's AI Index in 2017, the annual data-driven report on the state of artificial intelligence produced under the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and he has continued as a co-chair of the project. He served on the OECD's expert work on classifying AI systems and, from 2021 to 2024, as an inaugural member of the United States National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, which advises the president on AI policy.²⁵

Anthropic and AI Governance

When Dario Amodei and a group of senior OpenAI staff resigned over the company's direction in late 2020, Clark left with them and cofounded Anthropic in early 2021, taking responsibility for the company's policy and government-relations work. As head of policy he is Anthropic's chief interlocutor with legislators and regulators, advocating for AI safety testing, transparency requirements, and export controls, and he co-authored Anthropic's submissions to government AI consultations. In March 2026 the company launched the Anthropic Institute, a research arm studying AI's effects on society, which Clark leads.¹⁶

Clark has used Import AI and public appearances to argue that AI capabilities are advancing faster than institutions can absorb, at one point estimating a high probability that AI systems would begin meaningfully contributing to the design of their own successors before the end of the decade, and he has warned against both unconstrained acceleration and a regulatory vacuum. The company he cofounded raised capital at a pace that made its early staff wealthy: after the 2022 Sam Bankman-Fried investment of roughly 500 million dollars through Alameda Research, Anthropic drew about 8 billion dollars from Amazon and roughly 3 billion from Google, closed a 13-billion-dollar Series F in September 2025 at a 183-billion-dollar valuation, raised further rounds carrying the valuation toward a trillion dollars, and in mid-2026 filed confidentially for an initial public offering after raising well over 100 billion dollars in total; Bloomberg's billionaires index began tracking Clark as a billionaire on the strength of his founder's stake.⁶⁷⁸