“Are you a philosophical zombie driven by Claude?”
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“Are you a philosophical zombie driven by Claude?”<br>Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark in conversation with Brendan McCord
Cosmos Institute, Brendan McCord, and Jack Clark<br>May 22, 2026
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On Wednesday, Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, delivered the second Cosmos Lecture in partnership with the Human-Centered AI Lab at the University of Oxford. The lecture was introduced by HAI Lab Director Professor Philipp Koralus and was followed by a fireside chat between Jack and Brendan McCord, the founder of Cosmos Institute.<br>We’re bringing you a lightly edited transcript of the conversation, which covered what AI cannot do for us, whether Claude makes us better thinkers, and what Jack wants future AI systems to know about humanity. The full lecture will follow in the coming weeks.<br>Subscribe for future events and weekly essays about AI and self-authorship.
Philosophy to code
Brendan McCord: Jack, you ended with the call to build the new world. It makes me think – if you and I were having this conversation 250 years ago, the proudest project we could have possibly been engaged in would have been building a new world of sorts. I would call it the philosophy-to-law pipeline. We would have been looking to Oxford intellectuals like John Locke, or Montesquieu, Livy, Adam Smith, and translating that into a constitution that we hoped would frame freedom for the 250 years to come.<br>The proudest project we can engage in now is, as you say, this new world-building project – it’s philosophy-to-code. What would you say about the extent to which the frontier labs take that seriously? What can we do to really take that seriously in places like Oxford and academia? And what should we do in nonprofit land to take that philosophy-to-code project seriously?<br>Jack Clark: I think it requires you to basically accept that progress will continue and try to model out scenarios based on it. I think dealing with COVID highlighted that, though there’d been some modeling of what would happen, if you had very fast take-off propagating viruses the world would break very quickly. We felt underprepared, and that we could have done more scenario work and forecasting of what these strange things would do to us ahead of time.<br>Within the AI labs, I think there is now work at all of them on trying to imagine what you might think of as “post-AGI worlds,” or worlds that happen after recursive self-improvement. But my general sense is every time you sit in a room at the lab, people say, “Are we the only people working on this?” And you say, “I’m terribly sorry, yes.” And then some people put their head in their hands and wish that more people were working on it.<br>The good news is that this is exactly the kind of work that universities and other organizations are built for because you don’t need to be running a large-scale supercomputer or training a very capital-intensive model. You need rather to model out, in a theoretical sense, the properties of an AI system that can massively multiply productivity, or an AI system whose inference costs fall at X rate, and capabilities rise at Y rate. What does that do to the economy? What are the things that it unlocks? What are the aspects of this supply chain where you might invest, or change the supply chain to actually change the character of the systems? There’s tremendous work to be done.<br>I’ve been in the UK, in part speaking with the UK government, and I made this point: if the UK government just had 10 to 20 people whose sole job was modelling out what happens if the technologists are right about this technology, the UK would be better prepared than any other country in the world – because so little work has happened. So it’s a great time for universities to be doing these projects.<br>Brendan: So should Madison, Hamilton, and Jay have spent a lot more time on forecasting than they did on debating the nature of man and the political order?<br>Jack: It’s a hard question. I feel like you have a take on this!<br>Brendan: I think we can’t miss the part of contemplating about the ends. And I think what brought them together was a kind of unique epistemic humility that they shared with the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers.<br>Jack: My assumption with AI is that there is a huge value in norms and precedent – which is, how do we want these systems to show up in the world? I’ve covered that a bit less in my talk, but it relates to how we shape the so-called “character,” or what some might say personality, of these systems. How do we want them to behave towards us? This is a normative question – a philosophical question – and we should absolutely work on that.<br>But I have been struck by how surprised even the AI labs have been by their own progress, which is a very counterintuitive thing. We work with these AI labs and they keep saying, “Well, you know, as we said last year at Anthropic, we did a load of work on the increasing rate of...