By PYMNTS | October 18, 2026
Anthropic’s co-founder predicts that artificial intelligence could boost America’s economic output by nearly 50% by 2030.
That forecast comes from one of the AI startup’s internal models, Jack Clark said Saturday (Oct. 17) at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok.
Global cooperation is needed to establish “unusual and serious rules” for AI, and policymakers have a limited window to act, added Clark, whose comments were reported by CNBC.
He said that while the estimated potential U.S. gross domestic product of $44 trillion, compared to the current $30 trillion, “sounds very outlandish,” but argued that AI was leading to major leaps in scientific discovery.
Clark said the forecast assumed “the technology continuing to get better. And if GDP were to grow this much, then economic doctrine suggests that new industries and inventions would need to have been created to power such a major economic expansion.”
As CNBC noted, Clark’s comments came as Anthropic is preparing for its initial public offering, expected next month and projected to value the company at up to $2 trillion.
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Clark also warned policymakers about the pace of AI development, pointing to growing evidence suggesting a “singularity” in which AI development exceeds human control.
“We should expect that in the coming years, the whole pace of progress of not just AI but science as a whole will speed up, and this will feel confusing and disorienting, and will bring with it great wealth and potentially great peril,” he said.
In other AI news, PYMNTS spoke last week with Ashley Hillman, vice president of product at UPS Capital, about the company’s efforts to use AI to prevent delivery failures.
To get ahead of these issues, Hillman told PYMNTS that UPS Capital had recently rolled out CommerceShield, which runs AI large language models against two years of the company’s shipping data to forecast whether a delivery will succeed. This data covers upwards of 26 billion delivery touchpoints from 150 million-plus addresses across the U.S.
UPS Capital matches that delivery score with other signals, including the device or VPN a shopper uses and the email connected to an order, to generate what Hillman calls a “multi-signal super score.”
“Retailers can drill into the sub-scores behind it, such as delivery or digital identity risk, and attach actions to each: requiring a signature, routing a risky delivery to a staffed pickup point, or applying chargeback protection to a suspicious transaction,” the report added.
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