Matt Clifford

speaker

475 appearances 20 recordings 6 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 21 Aug

Matt Clifford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 20 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 8.

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The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 191. Is It Already Too Late to Control AI? (Anthropic Co-Founder, Jack Clark) · 31 May 2026 podcast

And actually, at the time...

If we think about the context in which OpenAI was founded, it was actually quite oriented around at least safety from the perspective of things like concentration of power and other risks, right?

I mean, we've recently, because of this epic court battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI, seen a lot of the founding emails and documents.

And there's this big thing of we don't want Demis to...

control this technology.

And today, of course, Anthropic, I think even now, describes itself as an AI safety research company.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the kind of importance of this idea in the founding journey of both OpenAI and Anthropic?

So if you were writing the report card on the world for how we're doing on this, where would you get to?

So for listeners, Jack and I have known each other for quite a long time before Anthropic, but we started really getting to know each other better when I was working in UK government and Jack was obviously doing his role in Anthropic and we worked together on creating the UK AC and the first AI Safety Summit.

And these were sort of early efforts to try and

dip our toes into this coordination.

That was nearly three years ago.

Lots has changed.

How do you think we're doing?

Well, and some of them did, not Jack.

But I remember a very well-known person in AI saying to me,

I just can't believe that you'll be better than us at machine learning evaluations.

I remember saying, no, but I really hope we're better at bioweapons.

And so joking aside, that is part of the answer, I think.

And to Jack's credit, I think he saw this very, very early that both from a legitimacy perspective and a capacity perspective, there are some things that only governments can do.

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