Anthropic Co-Founder Predicts AI Will Make Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery Within a Year

Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, predicted on May 21, 2026 that AI will help make a Nobel prize-winning discovery within 12 months and that AI-run companies will generate millions in revenue within 18 months. Anthropic, valued at $900 billion and founded by researchers who left OpenAI over safety concerns, recently launched its Mythos model that proved alarmingly capable at exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses. Clark warned of non-zero extinction risks from AI.

AI capability predictions

• ▪Jack Clark predicted that tradespeople will be helped by bipedal robots within two years of May 21, 2026
• ▪Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, predicted that an AI system will work with humans to make a Nobel prize-winning discovery within 12 months of May 21, 2026
• ▪Jack Clark predicted that companies run solely by AIs would be generating millions of dollars in revenue within 18 months of May 21, 2026
• ▪Jack Clark predicted that by the end of 2028, AI systems would be able to design their own successors

Anthropic safety concerns

• ▪Anthropic recently launched an AI model version called Mythos that proved alarmingly capable at exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses
• ▪Jack Clark stated on May 21, 2026 that there remained plausible scenarios in which AI technology had a non-zero chance of killing everyone on the planet
• ▪Anthropic was established by AI researchers who quit OpenAI over disagreements on safety

AI development competition

• ▪Anthropic has been valued at $900 billion
• ▪Critics of frontier AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google fear over-reliance on their few AI models could create a single point of failure in global systems
• ▪Anthropic's most popular AI model is called Claude
• ▪Anthropic has been accused by Donald Trump's White House and other AI accelerationists of fear-mongering to encourage regulation that could cement Anthropic's competitive position
• ▪Jack Clark stated that slowing AI development would not happen due to breakneck development by a variety of actors and countries locked in competition with one another, where commercial and geopolitical rivalries are drowning out existential-to-the-species aspects

Societal preparation challenges

• ▪Jack Clark delivered a lecture at Oxford University on May 20, 2026
• ▪Jack Clark compared the failure to prepare for AI to the failure to prepare for pandemics such as Covid
• ▪Jack Clark stated that it would be better if humans could slow AI development to give humanity more time as a species to deal with the implications of AI's powers
• ▪Jack Clark stated that if humanity stands by and lets synthetic intelligence multiply, humanity will eventually be forced into reactivity
• ▪The Institute for Ethics in AI co-hosted Jack Clark's lecture at Oxford University

Cognitive atrophy risks

• ▪Professor Edward Harcourt advocated for alternative AI models that ask humans to do more of the thinking, sometimes called Socratic AI
• ▪Professor Edward Harcourt, director of the Institute for Ethics in AI, warned that the rise of AIs that did more and more things for humans risked creating cognitive atrophy which could weaken humans' decision-making and powers of judgment

Perspective of AI safety critics and ethicists

• ▪Critics of frontier AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google fear over-reliance on their few AI models could create a single point of failure in global systems
• ▪Professor Edward Harcourt advocated for alternative AI models that ask humans to do more of the thinking, sometimes called Socratic AI

Perspective of AI accelerationists and Trump White House

• ▪Anthropic has been accused by Donald Trump's White House and other AI accelerationists of fear-mongering to encourage regulation that could cement Anthropic's competitive position