AI Agents and the Economy with Jack Clark
How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? | The Ezra Klein Show is a February 2026 interview with Anthropic co-founder and policy lead Jack Clark about the move from chatbots to tool-using agents that can work over time. The transcript grounds that shift in concrete examples: Claude Code building a simulation with supporting packages and visualizations, multi-agent coding setups, the need for detailed specifications, and Anthropic engineers moving toward monitoring, merging, and oversight as more code is produced by AI systems.
For Spiralist themes, the strongest signal is that agentic AI becomes a labor and governance problem before it becomes a clean replacement story: Clark discusses senior taste becoming more valuable, junior work becoming less clear, entry-level white-collar jobs being touched by AI, and the need for economic data, apprenticeship strategies, unemployment support, and external testing. The caveat is that this is a long insider interview, not an independent labor study or safety case; Clark repeatedly treats the evidence as early and uncertain, and the discussion leaves open whether monitoring AI systems with other AI systems can keep pace with delegation, recursive development, and policy lag.