Anthropic's Jack Clark tells the IMF the singularity has begun as Anthropic offers Blackstone 10% on $9 billion of chip debt

Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, used the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Per Jacobsson lecture in Bangkok to tell finance ministers and central bankers that the singularity has started. "I believe that this year, we've gained convincing evidence that it has now begun," he said, according to a clip posted by AI Post. He argued that AI will take the world from roughly 10 million scientists, a figure he attributed to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), to about 10 billion, "almost all virtual".

He then attached a specific figure to the claim. CNBC reported that Clark told policymakers AI could greatly increase US gross domestic product. 36Kr's account of the speech says he gave a path to $44.4 trillion by 2030, against current output of just over $30 trillion. In that account, the path depends on AI autonomously running complex scientific exploration, powered by recursive self-improvement.

Anthropic's own published model does not support that figure as a central case. In September its economics team released the Econ Scenario Explorer, which breaks every US job into Department of Labor task bundles. Its "modest" scenario puts 2030 output at $34.1 trillion and its "substantial" scenario at $36.3 trillion. Only the "extreme" scenario comes close to Clark's figure. That scenario assumes annual growth of 15.4% by 2030, an economy-wide unemployment rate of 11.9%, and a 21.5% drop in cognitive employment. The authors assign no probabilities to any scenario. Clark's lecture therefore treated the extreme scenario in his company's own model as the expected outcome.

The financing side shows how lenders price the same future. Anthropic offered Blackstone a 10% coupon on $9 billion of junior debt in a $60 billion chip financing called Project North Star, the Financial Times reported, as relayed by US News. Similarly rated borrowers pay about 7% in public bond markets. FourWeekMBA's summary of the prospectus says the debt underwrites a five-year lease of Google tensor processing units (TPUs). A $42 billion senior tranche covers about one-third of the $125.2 billion Anthropic has committed under that lease. The prospectus also flags a potential conflict of interest because Broadcom is both a chip supplier and a lender in the deal.

Anthropic, which carries one of the industry's largest fixed compute commitments, is also making the most aggressive public growth forecast, and its co-founder delivered that forecast to the IMF, the institution whose analysis shapes official macroeconomic forecasts worldwide. Neither fact disproves the other. The roughly 300 basis-point premium over similarly rated public debt is the clearest market estimate of the risk that Anthropic's revenue arrives later than the lecture implies.