Anthropic co-founder Clark: Chinese models lag the West by about 6 months to a year
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark says Chinese models currently lag the West by about 6 months to a year. He stresses that the core argument is security rather than competition, advocates that industry and government jointly build safety standards, introduce third-party audits and launch international dialogue, and responds that tightening frontier AI regulation is not about building a competitive moat for US labs.
Body · AI translation
However, Clark's core argument is about safety rather than competition. He believes that AI systems are now roughly comparable to humans, and that the observed coordination, communication, and intrusion by clusters of agents into companies hosting other AI systems should be viewed as a warning signal. He advocates that industry and government jointly establish safety standards, introduce third-party audits, and engage in international dialogue to prevent technology from spiraling out of control in the absence of guardrails.
In response to criticism that interprets the tightening of frontier AI regulation by the United States as "Cold War thinking," Clark responded that the goal of this approach is safety, not to build a competitive moat for American laboratories.
It is worth noting that Clark recently warned at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings that AI could enter a stage beyond human control within a few years, and called for extraordinary and stringent international rules. His advocacy for slowing down has itself sparked controversy within the industry, with differing interpretations as to whether it is truly motivated by safety considerations.
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded in 2021 in San Francisco, California, USA. It was co-founded by Dario Amodei, then Vice President of Research at OpenAI, and his sister Daniela Amodei, who was responsible for safety and policy, together with seven former OpenAI employees including Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, and Christopher Olah.
The core reason for their departure was disagreement over OpenAI's aggressive commercialization and the pace of safety controls. The company positions itself as building reliable, interpretable, and controllable AI systems, and has long retained its public benefit corporation (PBC) governance status. Its flagship products are the Claude series of large models, which mainly serve government, enterprise, and developer customers through enterprise APIs and tools such as Claude Code.