Anthropic's Co-Founder and Top Economist on Doing Research at the AI Frontier

June 19, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In August 2016, a Bloomberg reporter named Jack Clark sent a colleague a DM: he was leaving journalism to study AI, because it was "more important than anything else." He had been charting AI progress across vision, sound, video, and game-playing, and saw the beginning of an exponential everywhere he looked. Nearly a decade later, Clark is now co-founder of Anthropic, and Peter McCrory is the company's head of economics. Together they run the Anthropic Institute, an internal research unit tasked with measuring what the frontier actually does — to productivity, to the labor market, to the company's own engineering process, and to national security. The conversation covers what it means to live through a technology that is visibly accelerating inside the lab but has not yet transformed the broader economy, and what the company is doing to make sure the world sees the data before it is too late.

The gap between capability and diffusion

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What you'll learn

1 (04:44) **Why Jack Clark Called AI the "Biggest Story" in 2016** - Clark explains he saw exponential progress in AI benchmarks (vision, game-playing) and recognized a general-purpose technology at its inflection point.
2 (06:10) **The Purpose of Anthropic's Economics Lab** - Peter McCrory describes why a frontier AI company houses an economics research group.
3 (07:22) **Why the Economy Still Feels "Normal" Despite AI** - McCrory explains the gap between AI capabilities and macroeconomic impact.
4 (09:15) **Recursive Self-Improvement Inside Anthropic** - Jack Clark describes how AI tools have dramatically changed the company's own engineering output.
5 (10:36) **The "Bitter Lesson" and Techno-Pessimism** - Clark explains why he was surprised by the pace of progress and the power of scaling compute.
6 (13:56) **Can AI Automate Social Science Research?** - Discussion on whether AI will develop better "intuitions" than human researchers.
7 (16:41) **The Challenge of Recursive Self-Improvement** - Clark explains the two forms: compounding returns within AI orgs (happening now) and fully autonomous self-building (not yet).

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Jack Clark

Show Notes

There’s a lot to unpack with AI right now — everything from its potential impacts on the labor market and society to more extreme questions about existential risk. Anthropic, which builds frontier models like Mythos, Fable, and Claude, is actively grappling with these issues, including whether governments should limit AI development. Just last week, the Trump administration forced Anthropic to block foreign access to its two leading models. In this episode, we speak with Jack Clark (co-founder and head of public benefit) and Peter McCrory (head economist) about how Anthropic approaches safety and economic risks. We talk about its preparations for recursive self-improvement, the engineers it's hiring now, and why Jack left Bloomberg to enter the early AI industry.

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