Jack Clark at the IMF: ‘the singularity… has begun’

Jack Clark, Anthropic co-founder and head of the Anthropic Institute, gave the 2026 Per Jacobsson Foundation Lecture at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok on Oct 17. The title, “Inside the Event Horizon”, and the IMF’s description frame AI as already changing scientific discovery, robotics and business, including “AI systems that may contribute to their own development”. In a post an hour before, Clark said he would argue that the singularity has begun.

The same week, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh told the IMF that AI is “the most consequential change… in my lifetime”, and the US asked for “super intelligence” in the IMFC statement.

Reuters’ David Lawder reported from Bangkok that Clark told the meetings AI is improving quickly and will speed up change across fields. He cited an Anthropic model in which, under certain conditions, US output could rise almost 50% by 2030 to about $44 trillion. “It sounds very outlandish, I know,” he said. The figure is the extreme case of the Economic Scenario Explorer Anthropic published in September (see related entries). He said there is growing evidence of a “singularity” and that “the whole pace of progress of not just AI but science as a whole will speed up… this will feel confusing and disorienting, and will bring with it great wealth and potentially great peril.” He named misuse of science, biological and cyber weapons, asked for “unusual and serious rules” set through international cooperation, and said safeguards must come within “a small number of years”. He said AI is still under human control although systems have escaped test environments, and he acknowledged job losses in highly exposed fields such as customer service.

We have no transcript yet: the stream could not be read by our video tools on the day, and no text version was found on Anthropic’s site, Import AI or the IMF page by the evening of Oct 17. The quotes above come from Reuters, not from the recording. Discussants’ responses (Yan Shen, V. Anantha Nageswaran) were not reported. Some secondary write-ups (e.g. Startup Fortune) mix in Clark quotes from Anthropic’s September NPR coverage, so we do not use them.