Anthropic founder warns of AI risks
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the biggest artificial intelligence developers, Anthropic has warned that the latest models might escape human control. It has proposed a co-ordinated global slowdown on building AI systems. One of the firm's co-founders, Jack Clark has been speaking to BBC.
Also in the programme: the latest from Russia's flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg; and how an outsider reached the French Open tennis final.
(Photo: Anthropic logo. Credit: Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsAug for the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. |
| 0:14.4 | I'm James Menendez. And we're going to begin today talking about artificial intelligence, |
| 0:20.1 | the potential of this technology and its potential |
| 0:23.5 | pitfalls. In a few minutes, we'll hear how AI is helping scientists develop a completely new type |
| 0:29.9 | of vaccine that may offer protection against entire families of viruses. But we're going to begin |
| 0:35.8 | with a warning about the perils of AI from one of the |
| 0:38.5 | industry's biggest players, Anthropic. The company, which is poised to list on the US stock |
| 0:44.1 | market with a value of a trillion dollars, is calling for the whole industry to consider |
| 0:48.8 | slowing down the pace of development while society weighs up the implications of the technology. |
| 0:56.2 | Anthropics says its AI models are now writing their own computer code to a level of about 80%. |
| 1:02.5 | And if that reaches 100%, well, then humans will lose any oversight of the process. |
| 1:09.0 | Jack Clark is one of the firm's co-founders. He's been speaking |
| 1:11.9 | exclusively to our business editor, Faisal Islam. Right now, it's like the AI industry has a gas |
| 1:18.3 | pedal, but it doesn't have a brake pedal in the car. And what we're saying is we want to do some |
| 1:23.0 | of the work required to build that brake pedal, so we in the world have an option. It's not obvious today that |
| 1:29.4 | you want to do that, but absolutely, as you say, at some point in the future, you might say, |
| 1:33.9 | let's get all of the benefits we can for, say, biology and medical research. And let's take a |
| 1:39.2 | pause or take a moment on AI research where we can absorb the societal changes implied by this. |
| 1:46.2 | A number of Silicon Valley AI companies are raising tens of billions of dollars, |
| 1:51.9 | including yourself, valuations of a trillion dollar plus. |
| 1:57.5 | And some argue that these are sort of great narratives that help you sell your kit to the world's biggest companies and walk away with these epic valuations. |
... |
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