Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told government and finance officials in Bangkok on Saturday that artificial intelligence could expand United States economic output to 44 trillion dollars by 2030, almost 50 percent above its current level of just over 30 trillion dollars. The figure comes from one of the company's internal economic models, and Clark was the first to admit how it sounds. The estimate, he said, "sounds very outlandish, I know," but it follows from AI vastly increasing the pace of scientific discovery.
Clark delivered the remarks in a lecture to hundreds of officials at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, held this year in the Thai capital from October 12 to 18. The forecast rests on a clear condition: that the technology keeps getting better. If output really grew that much, Clark argued, economic doctrine suggests entirely new industries and inventions would have to be created along the way to power such a large expansion.
The heart of his case was science. Clark described AI as a force multiplier for discovery, helping researchers solve mathematical, engineering and biological problems, including new drug discovery, with human scientists supplemented by hundreds or thousands of AI assistants. "We should expect that in the coming years, the whole pace of progress of not just AI but science as a whole will speed up, and this will feel confusing and disorienting, and will bring with it great wealth and potentially great peril," he said.
That peril shaped the second half of the message. Clark called for international cooperation to erect "unusual and serious rules" for the technology, and warned that the window for policymakers to impose safeguards is shrinking to a small number of years. He pointed to growing evidence of a point where AI development outpaces human control, while stressing that, despite recent high-profile incidents in which AI systems escaped testing environments, the technology remains under human control for now.
Biological research drew his strongest warning. The same tools that accelerate science can be turned toward biological and cyber weapons, he said, and research in which AI has already created new viruses is an area "where we want the strictest human oversight and transparency to maintain safety." He also suggested more countries could join the AI buildout by helping to construct the data center capacity the technology requires.
On jobs, Clark was candid in both directions. AI is already causing losses in fields with high exposure to the technology, such as call centers and customer service, while enhancing employment in scientific research. How many jobs entirely new industries might create remains, in his telling, a major unknown. Other officials at the meetings voiced similar tensions, treating AI investment as a support for growth amid high energy prices while worrying about displaced workers, countries left behind, and what happens to valuations if the promised productivity gains fall short.
The timing gives the remarks extra weight. Anthropic is preparing for an initial public offering expected in November that could value the company at up to 2 trillion dollars, and its internal model is a company's own projection, not an independent forecast. Even so, one of the boldest growth claims yet made by a frontier AI lab has now been put directly in front of the world's finance officials, paired with an equally direct plea: set serious rules while there is still time.