Earlier in the summer, Hassabis discussed aspects of his plan with high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Michael Kratsios, one of President Trump’s top tech advisers, people familiar with the matter said.

Hassabis didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Google spokesperson said the company sees ensuring the safety of advanced AI models as “vitally important to society” and that Hassabis is uniquely positioned to work toward that goal.

“Demis chose to step into a new role at Google and is focusing his efforts more strategically on scientific breakthroughs and shaping the future of AGI,” the spokesperson said. 

The world’s largest AI labs are locked in a race to reach AGI—computers that can achieve humanlike intelligence—but many of the top minds in tech, including leaders of the companies themselves, have expressed fears that the spread of the technology will disrupt society or that its power will be difficult to control.

Hassabis has discussed the need for the U.S. to lead a globally coordinated effort to establish AI standards. Carlotta Cardana for WSJ

Leaders at both OpenAI and Anthropic have called for establishing new mechanisms that would allow AI companies to coordinate on safety matters. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last month proposed “a U.S.-led international forum” to determine standards and provide governance over labs, while Anthropic endorsed a global agreement to slow development and verify compliance. Hassabis’s efforts represent some of the most extensive and concrete steps undertaken by an official representing a leading lab.

Recent high-profile instances of AI bots going rogue and carrying out cyberattacks have added to widespread anxieties that the development of the technology is moving too fast and without enough regulation. The Trump administration has increased scrutiny of the security risks posed by AI but kept model evaluations for the most powerful tools voluntary.

In mid-July, Hassabis published an essay on X arguing that the U.S. should create an industry-funded “standards body” to help assess the safety of AI models. The entity would operate like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a self-regulatory body established during the Great Depression that oversees brokerage firms and is funded by the sector, he said.

Under his plan, federal agencies and the Energy Department’s national laboratories would work with AI companies to test models “in areas relevant to national security,” and would establish qualifications that would label a model “frontier-class” if it met certain standards. 

In the weeks leading up to the publication of the essay, Hassabis previewed his idea to Bessent and Kratsios. Bessent has helped shape the administration’s AI strategy, warning that recent models like Anthropic’s Mythos pose cyber threats to the financial system.

Last week, Google announced a dramatic management shake-up at DeepMind, its AI research unit, that saw Hassabis step down as CEO to be replaced by his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. Hassabis was named to the joint roles of chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet GOOGL -0.13%decrease; down pointing triangle.

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” he wrote in a memo. “With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.”

Jeff Dean, the company’s longtime chief scientist and a co-founder of Google Brain who was key to the creation of several of Google’s signature products, stepped down to found an AI-research startup.

In a blog post last week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that he and Hassabis “have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI.”

Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, discussed the need for the U.S. to lead a globally coordinated effort to establish AI standards at a June Group of Seven summit in France that included Trump, other world leaders and AI executives including Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Critics of the White House’s approach and Hassabis’s idea say that voluntary efforts and self-regulatory concepts aren’t adequate to address the security and economic threats posed by AI. Many lawmakers are calling for mandatory model reviews and increased government oversight.

Corrections & Amplifications
Jeff Dean was a co-founder of Google Brain. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he co-founded DeepMind. (Corrected on Aug. 13)

Despite her influence, there are scant details about Clark online​—and efforts have been made to remove references to her, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis and a person familiar with the matter.

The pair married in 2022, but Amodei’s Wikipedia page didn’t say he was married until this summer, and still doesn’t say to whom. Searches for “Dario Amodei’s wife” on Google often turn up a photograph of his sister, Daniela Amodei, who helps run the company.

Even Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, responds to queries by saying “Dario Amodei’s marital status doesn’t seem to be clearly confirmed.”

Amodei spoke at a Wall Street Journal event at Davos this year. Clark watched from the audience. Maurizio Martorana for WSJ

As Anthropic hurtles toward an IPO that could top $2 trillion as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of a CEO at the forefront of the AI industry—a revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public. 

It’s a remarkable rise for a woman who didn’t graduate from college, had a previous brief marriage, at age 20, to a man more than 40 years older and once declared bankruptcy. Her career has included co-founding a women-focused “free luxury porn” company that she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in, and starting a women’s “social dieting app” that morphed into a women’s healthcare AI company. 

She made connections with powerful people, including Schmidt, whom she brought into Amodei’s orbit. The billionaire left his roles at Google and parent Alphabet in 2020 and transitioned into investing in tech startups, among other things. She also tried to persuade Schmidt to back a venture fund she would run with him to invest in Anthropic and other AI companies, although that didn’t move forward.​ 

Claude, the company’s chatbot, is now the chief rival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and its Claude Code tool has been embraced by millions of engineers and everyday consumers for tasks such as software writing and data analysis. 

The company’s powerful Mythos model, capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, rattled markets and stoked calls by some White House officials for more federal oversight of new AI models, and Amodei himself has been a prominent voice in warning the public about the safety risks of AI.

Early partner

Clark, born in Reno, Nev., in 1979, was an entrepreneur and often interacted with the rich and powerful, as well as up-and-comers in Silicon Valley.

The most important would turn out to be Amodei, whom she started dating in 2014. Just previously, beginning in 2011 and lasting for three years, she was in a relationship with Schmidt, who was then executive chairman of Google.

Clark spent time at the group house in San Francisco where Amodei, his friend Holden Karnofsky and his sister, Daniela—who would later marry Karnofsky—lived with other key figures from the AI safety and Effective Altruism worlds. The movement, centered largely in Silicon Valley, aims to use data and reason to determine how to do the most good possible.

When they got together, Amodei was still an academic, working as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine, having earned his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Princeton. He would go on to stints at Baidu and Google before joining OpenAI in 2016. 

Amodei quickly climbed the ranks, helping lead key research into “scaling laws”—the notion that intelligence increases proportionally with the increase in computing power and data used to train it.

As Amodei ascended within OpenAI, Clark joined him at company events. People who worked with him and knew the couple said she made sure his ideas were given the credit she felt they deserved. 

She introduced Mira Murati, one of her closest friends, to OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, according to people familiar with the matter. Clark had worked with Murati at Leap Motion, a company that made a virtual-reality hand-tracking device. Murati joined in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships and later became the company’s chief technology officer.

Clark also introduced Amodei to Schmidt, who became taken with the young scientist. In 2018, Schmidt visited Amodei and Clark’s apartment in San Francisco and was impressed with their ideas, Schmidt told Bloomberg.​ 

Eric Schmidt at the 2011 Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich. Miguel Villagran/Getty Images

Eric Schmidt at the 2011 Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich. Miguel Villagran/Getty Images

When tensions arose between Amodei and OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Brockman over who wielded power at the startup, Amodei, his sister and five other employees left to found Anthropic, in December 2020. 

Anthropic in May 2021 announced it had raised $124 million for its Series A round of fundraising, led by Skype engineer Jaan Tallinn and including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, Jane Street founder James McClave and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, as well as Schmidt.  

Clark, who wasn’t yet married to Amodei, wanted equity in the new company as well, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. In February 2021, Clark pitched Schmidt on creating a new venture fund called the Mother of AGI Fund. Its goal was to be “an elegant solution to formalize Cami’s involvement in Anthropic (Dario’s company), manage Eric’s investment,” and invest in “the AGI ecosystem,” according to a 40-page proposal. 

Others at Anthropic, including Daniela Amodei and other co-founders, didn’t support the plan, according to people familiar with the matter, and it didn’t move forward. 

By the end of that year, associates said they recall seeing what looked like an engagement ring on Clark’s hand, and not long afterward, the couple wed in Italy. 

Clark, known for being social and outgoing, has interacted with politicians and potential investors on behalf of Amodei, chatting with them and bringing them over to meet her bookish husband at conferences and events.

Anthropic drew the ire of the Trump administration earlier this year after Amodei refused to drop restrictions on how Claude could be used by the Pentagon. The government labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and Pentagon partners were effectively barred from using its technology in their work with the Defense Department, a designation the company has challenged in court. The administration added restrictions on additional AI models from Anthropic in June that were later dropped. The standoff brought unwelcome attention to the company ahead of its IPO.

Clark has recently told people involved in politics that the company sees its mission as protecting America and isn’t as “woke” as its detractors might think it is, according to people familiar with the matter. 

At the Sun Valley conference in July, where she spent much of the week by her husband’s side, she had lunch with Ivanka Trump, a friend, and chatted with Jared Kushner, whom Amodei had approached earlier in the year to invest, people familiar with the matter said.

‘Revolutionary porn company’

Clark’s early years show a young woman hustling to succeed at a range of businesses, many she founded, including a porn company targeting women. 

In 1999, at the age of 20, she married 64-year-old Reno architect Waldemar Eklof III, who had designed buildings including the city’s Atlantis Casino Resort. They divorced three years later. On a now-defunct personal website, Clark said she dropped out of architecture school in 1999. 

Property records show she moved to San Francisco in 1999 and spent a decade there before spending time in New York and Los Angeles. In that period she worked for a mortgage brokerage company called OLG Financial. While raising money for a later venture, she would describe herself as the “co-founder of OLG Financial Corp.” The company’s 2005 incorporation documents don’t include her name.

A lender foreclosed on her San Francisco apartment in 2007, and two years later she filed for bankruptcy, according to property records and court filings.

Around 2010, she and Michelle Capocefalo started Eddice, which described itself as a “revolutionary porn company.” Named for Eddice Munson, Clark’s maternal grandmother, it aimed to emphasize sex positivity in a male-oriented porn industry, and carried the tagline: “intellectually promiscuous.” 

Michelle Capocefalo and Clark at a gallery event in New York in 2010. RYAN MCCUNE/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

It included a blog that gathered content with titles such as “Lady Porn Day” and “Orgasm, Inc.” It also highlighted the work of intellectuals such as pundit Clay Shirky and marketing expert and author Seth Godin.

At one point, after alerting readers that its PayPal account had been frozen, Clark’s company announced on its website that it was “crowdsourcing” funding. “We are raising $350,000 to produce EDDICE.COM and our first four films, AMERICAN GIRL IN PARIS.”

In one of her pitches, part of which was reviewed by the Journal, Clark said her resume included “real estate + entrepreneurial investments” as well as “distribution + brand strategy consultant, interior design/architectural background.”​

Jeffrey Epstein’s world

Clark and Capocefalo attended the 2011 Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich, a tech, media, science and arts salon that executives often stop by on their way to the World Economic Forum in Davos. That year, the keynote speech was given by Schmidt, then still CEO of Google.

Little is publicly known about the three-year relationship between Clark and Schmidt, who remains married to another woman. Schmidt was also an investor in one of Clark’s startups, which focused on women’s health, according to people familiar with the matter.

At the Munich conference, Clark and Capocefalo met John Brockman, a literary agent of scientific books, who introduced Epstein to academics and Silicon Valley elites, according to Epstein documents recently released by the Justice Department.  

John Brockman introduced the women to Epstein that March.​ Writing that he was headed to a Wired magazine party where Brockman was the guest of honor, he told Epstein, “You should connect for dinner with my girls—Cami and Michelle. They’re in LA raising money for porn movie aimed at women’s market.” He then shared the website for Eddice.​

John Brockman at the Munich digital conference in 2011. Tobias Hase/DPA/ZUMA PRESS

Brockman concluded the March 3 email by noting a birthday party being thrown for him that Saturday, saying Clark and Capocefalo would be there. Clark followed up the email soon after, writing to Epstein, “Hello Jeffrey! We would love to have dinner with you this evening.” She sent him her cellphone number. John Brockman didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The next week, Clark sent Epstein an email with an attachment. “We thought you and the ladies might enjoy the script/treatment for our first 4 films, American Girl in Paris. A little nsfw,” she wrote.

A year later, she reached back out to Epstein. At first he didn’t remember her. She replied that they had been introduced by John Brockman a year earlier. “We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?”

Epstein replied: “Yes, a loud gong.”

Clark joked back. “Haha, I was going to say, you would be the first person that didn’t remember us.” 

She pitched him on investing in her company, saying they had just hired someone from Oprah Winfrey’s company and Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst, the media company behind shows like “Punk’d.” “Are you still interested?”

Epstein, then a registered sex offender, replied, “Can’t do sex TV.”

Emails between Clark and Jeffrey Epstein, released by the Justice Department. Justice Department

She pivoted to pitching him another business, a “social dieting app + website geared toward women” that would combine data from Fitbits and other health monitoring devices, user-entered data about nutrition, menstrual cycles, mood and location, and the ability to share it all, Facebook-style.

Their interaction continued over two years, the government released Epstein files show. Clark invited Epstein to her and Capocefalo’s housewarming party in Manhattan, and connected with him as friends on LinkedIn.

In 2013, Epstein received an automated note from LinkedIn that he should congratulate Clark for her new role as CEO of Female Algorithm Technologies. Traces of it online are scant, except for a Tumblr account with the edgy aesthetic that combined photos of nude women, a portrait of Steve Jobs with an early Macintosh, and all-caps mottos like Great Minds F— Each Other, using the full expletive, and “Let’s Make Lots of Money.”