Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said on October 17, 2026, at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, that one of the company's internal economic models forecasts US economic output could expand to $44 trillion by 2030, Reuters reported. US GDP currently stands at just over $30 trillion — in other words, the model implies the US economy would grow by nearly half in a little over four years.
The $44 trillion figure is not casual, but it carries a precondition
Clark did not present the number as settled fact. He first conceded that it "sounds very outlandish," and his reasoning was that AI is vastly increasing scientific discovery, and that if the technology keeps improving at its current pace, this magnitude is what the model implies. He added an economic constraint: if GDP really grew this much, economic doctrine suggests entirely new industries and inventions would need to have been created to power such an expansion. In other words, the condition for $44 trillion is not existing industries using a bit more AI, but industries that do not yet exist appearing from scratch — which is exactly what makes this forecast hardest to confirm and easiest to falsify.
This is one company's internal model, not a consensus forecast
The source matters when reading the figure: it comes from Anthropic's own internal economic model, not from the IMF, the World Bank or an independent research institution, and Clark did not publish the model's assumptions or method. In the same week, Anthropic released a survey of employee expectations in which its own staff estimated AI could handle 75% of their work, far above the public's estimate of 28%. Read together, a clearer picture emerges: on how fast AI's impact arrives, the expectation gap between the people closest to the models and those furthest from them is itself one of the largest variables right now.
What he really came to push at the meetings was rules
The other half of Clark's remarks was governance: he called for international cooperation to erect "unusual and serious rules" for this transformative technology. Pairing an optimistic growth forecast with a stern call for rules in the same speech is not a contradiction — in his framing, it is precisely because the impact is arriving this fast and this large that rules cannot be written at the usual pace. For ordinary readers, the practical use of these remarks is not to write $44 trillion into any plan, but to note two trackable checkpoints: whether genuinely new AI-driven industries actually appear in the US over the next few years, and whether countries set up international rules for frontier AI that go beyond the ordinary. How far those two come true will decide whether the number ends up as prophecy or rhetoric.
