Podcast Club ONLINE: AI Agents and Anthropic

This week's podcast is The Ezra Klein Show, with guest Jack Clark, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, which launched in 2021 and developed a family of LLMs named Claude.

We are all familiar with chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, which talk or write. But we're now entering a new age where AI agents are coming to the forefront -- where AI's capability moves from telling to doing. AI agents can complete all kinds of tasks on their own and can collaborate and communicate with other AI to do so. In this podcast episode, Clark discusses AI agents (including Claude Code, Anthropic's AI agent), what they can do, current challenges in working with them, and how they might impact our future. He addresses how he thinks this new era could impact our economy, our labor market, public society, our kids, and the way we think. Clark also speaks about his concerns with AI safety. Since its inception, Anthropic built a strong reputation as an AI-safety-focused leader, but this may be changing now. In the podcast, Klein asks Clark about a current dispute Anthropic has with the DOD (aka Department of War), which Clark understandably declines to discuss. At the heart of the dispute is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants Anthropic to disregard its AI safeguards in working with the DOD or suffer great consequences. While, again, this was not discussed in the podcast, it is an important issue that impacts issues including governmental surveillance (including of Americans), weapons capability, morality, and AI safety. As of the date this Meetup event was posted (2/25/26), the following article was published by CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/tech/anthropic-safety-policy-change. Please feel free to follow this moving story so we can discuss it at the meeting.

Clark serves as Anthropic's head of policy. He writes a weekly AI newsletter called Import AI. Clark is also engaged in global AI policy, serving as an expert for the Global Partnership on AI and on an AI committee of the OECD, a 38-country intergovernmental organization dedicated to stimulate economic progress and world trade. Clark previously worked at OpenAI as its policy director and, before that, was a technology journalist for outlets such as Bloomberg News.

PLEASE NOTE: We require that attendees listen to the podcast below before attending the meeting to optimize discussion.

ALSO, it's possible that either of the below links have changed between the time of this posting and when you click on it. Please double-check that you're listening to the correct episode of The Ezra Klein Show, which is entitled: How Quickly Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jack-clark.html (includes edited transcript)

or

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000751168842

(1 hr, 38 min.)

What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times during the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm

Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.