Anthropic's Jack Clark tells policymakers AI could push US GDP to about $44 trillion by 2030

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark used a speech at the IMF meeting in Bangkok on October 17 to tell economists, bankers and policymakers that AI progress is accelerating fast enough to change the economy. Delivering the Per Jacobsson lecture, he argued that AI has begun to drive the pace of science itself, and said he believes the singularity has begun.

The headline number came from Anthropic's own modeling. Clark said that if models can autonomously complete a broad range of tasks and spread quickly through the economy, US GDP could reach $44 trillion by 2030. He acknowledged the figure sounds outlandish and presented it as a scenario under those assumptions, not a prediction.

To support the case, he cited benchmark gains: on one hard exam, top systems went from 8% in January 2025 to 67.7% for Claude Opus 5.5, and on a difficult math test the best scores rose from 2% to 94%. He also said Anthropic researchers now produce almost 10 times as much code as in the company's first four years.

Clark urged governments to build scientific and robotic capacity, not just data centers, and warned that the same capabilities raise risks in biology and cyberattacks that will need human oversight and likely new rules.

Our take

Treat this as a lab's scenario, not a measurement. A company that sells AI has every reason to describe a very large prize, and the number depends entirely on assumptions about how fast agents spread through real businesses.