Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark appeared in front of Congress at the end of June for a hearing about why the nation has to lead in artificial intelligence innovation and deployment. Clark, in his opening remarks, acknowledged that the US can win the race to build powerful AI but, “We have to get safety right.”
Clark continued that, when he says “powerful AI,” he’s pointing to AI systems that would be a major advancement beyond the current capabilities of the technology, but believes that it’s buildable by late 2026 or early 2027.
Clark, during the hearing, pointed to the need to have AI crafted in the US, saying: “I know that AI systems are a reflection of the societies that build them. AI built in democracies will lead to better technology for all of humanity.”
Clark’s statement and responses focused on the need for US control over the proliferation of AI systems as well as a federal-level focus on innovating within the government and investing in capacity for security testing.
“The US government must find ways to accelerate deployment of AI technology across federal agencies, especially within the intelligence community,” Clark said. “This will help our government move faster in handling a rapidly evolving threat landscape, and it will help us gain a better understanding of AI’s impact on national security.”
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The Anthropic co-founder said that the US “should control the proliferation of powerful AI systems” through the maintenance and strengthening of export controls of advanced semiconductors to China.
“This all runs through compute,” Clark said.
A lot of hearings. The hearing followed Anthropic’s success in federal court, where it won a copyright infringement lawsuit from three individual authors—the putative class action was sparked by complaints that Anthropic had allegedly infringed on federal copyrights by “pirating copies for its library and reproducing them to train its [large language models],” according to the filing.
The judge, William Alsup, granted summary judgement for Anthropic that “the training was a fair use…But it denies summary judgement for Anthropic that the pirated copies must be treated as training copies.”
Alsup wrote that there will be a trial on pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” Alsup said in the filing. “Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from the library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.”