Jack Clark, co-founder of leading AI company Anthropic, says he knows too much about what AI can do, good and bad. He's in Washington this week to pass some knowledge off to lawmakers.

• Ashley and Maria sat down with Clark, who formerly worked as a journalist covering AI, amid his meetings on Capitol Hill.

• Anthropic, which closely competes with OpenAI but is thought of as the slower-paced and more measured of the companies, got a pledge for up to $2 billion in investment from Google last year.

What he's saying: "We generally want to be quite honest brokers, to generate information and pass it on," Clark said.

• "Part of why we're doing that is to give [lawmakers] a sense of how important it is for the government itself to develop and understand this technology."

Details: Some of the things Clark thinks are essential to ensure that AI is being used responsibly and the U.S. can continue to lead:

• Clarity on fair use and copyright rules for training AI systems.
• Ample funding for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource and the U.S. AI Safety Institute for standard setting and testing.
• Legislation that would guarantee people a right to know when they're speaking to an AI system.

Clark said that when he visits Washington, "I am made uneasy by how much information we have about this technology" relative to what lawmakers have.

Yes, but: "What's encouraging is that people in Washington have put AI on the agenda as something people view as legitimate and worth spending time on," he said.

• "Where things have been slightly less good is … getting ahead of ourselves and trying to come up with perfect, intricate regulatory regimes when we're starting from close to zero on AI."
• The industry and government should figure out how to make AI "boring," Clark said, by figuring out uniform regulatory and testing regimes standard in other industries.

State of play: With the 2024 election coming up, Anthropic's Claude chatbot is not allowed to be used for political campaigning, a similar position to that of other major AI companies.

• But never say never, Clark said, if standards and testing improve.
• "We're taking a somewhat conservative position … but if you look over history, things that would seem really confusing tend to then become boring and standardized."

The bottom line: The U.S. is leading on AI development, Clark said, but it's fragile. "It can change very quickly," he said. "You don't want to lose."

• "If there's a bad misuse or accident it'll set the industry back decades, and we can't afford that, so having government regulation is essential," he said.

Clark spent time as a reporter before his role as head of policy at Anthropic, covering AI and cloud for Bloomberg and tech for other outlets. Ashley and Maria asked him whether the press is doing a good job covering AI.

• His answer: Pretty much!

• "The media actually cares about AI now, and there's a ton of reporters looking beyond the headlines and gee-whiz stuff into actual issues of power, regulation, benefits and real harms."

If he still worked as an AI journalist, what would he write? "One story would be asking, what are people actually trying to do with AI, what does it mean, and what does it look like?"

• "Another would be asking, what is the craziest stuff I can do with consumer-level AI right now?"
• "A third would be, is the government actually able to regulate this industry; do they have the necessary offices with adequate funding?"(We'd like to add that this month we wrote a version of that very story in this newsletter.)

A new bipartisan bill aims to cut off key Chinese biotech companies from U.S. taxpayer funding, highlighting the increasing convergence of health care and national security, Axios' Peter Sullivan and Adriel Bettelheim report.

Why it matters: BGI Group, a company targeted by the bill and the world's biggest genomics company, was included on a Defense Department blacklist of Chinese military companies directly or indirectly doing business in the U.S.

• Bill sponsors say they're worried the company might collect genetic information that potentially could be used to develop a bioweapon targeting Americans.
• The bill "advances the broader concern that biotechnology is increasingly being viewed as a national security issue," wrote Raymond James analyst Chris Meekins.

Details: The bill from Reps. Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, leaders of the House Select Committee on the CCP, would restrict federally funded health providers from buying equipment and services from "foreign adversary biotech companies."

• That reference specifically includes BGI Group, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute.

This story first appeared in Axios Pro: Health Care Policy. Sign up.