Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told BBC News that AI should have to pass the same kind of pre-market test a baby toy does, and that failing it should mean you cannot sell:
"In pretty much any country in the world, I have young children, if you want to sell like baby toys or baby food, there's a bunch of standards you have to go through to bring those to market."
"Which basically check like, do the toys have sharp things on them? When my baby inevitably sticks the toy in its mouth, will it poison the baby?"
"And if you fail those tests, you don't get to sell it in the country."
"That's because we have just sensible common sense safety standards for things that get sold in countries."
"Any country in the world can implement a set of safety standards which AI companies need to pass to bring things to market. That's something that any nation can and should do."
He was asked what he would say to G7 leaders given Washington's reluctance; his answer was that any single country can set the bar for its own market without waiting on an international agreement.
Clark co-founded a company that sells frontier models, and a pre-market regime also favours whoever can already afford compliance.
We can test a baby toy because we know what failure looks like. Deciding what counts as passing for a general-purpose model, and who gets to check, is the work that turns a good line into a standard.
- Jack Clark (
@jackclarkSF), co-founder of Anthropic (
@AnthropicAI), with BBC News (
@BBCNews).