Anthropic billionaire cofounder Jack Clark studied literature, not code—and says liberal arts degrees will win in the AI age

AI may be restoring the importance of the liberal arts degree, at least according to the cofounder of one of the industry’s biggest players.

Jack Clark, a billionaire cofounder of Anthropic and former journalist who majored in English literature and creative writing, says his literary education is what helped him become an influential figure in the world of AI.

“I’m a literature graduate, and I don’t think you’d put that as a cofounder of a frontier AI company, but what turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future,” he said during a conference earlier this year.

“That’s turned out to be, like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn’t have predicted,” he added.

For young people trying to figure out where they fit in an increasingly AI-fueled economy, their best bet may be learning to ask the right questions, he added.

“The really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting if you collided different insights from many different disciplines,” he said.

Clark claimed young people should avoid pursuing basic or “rote programming” and added the degrees that are going to become even more relevant in the future are the ones that involve “synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that,” he said.

Cracks in STEM Clark’s insight comes as more young people are grappling with what an AI-dominated future looks like for them.

For decades, enrollment in STEM education exploded—partly owing to a spike in computer science interest that helped increase science and engineering graduate enrollment by more than one-third between 2000 and 2015, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES).

Between 2013 and 2023 STEM job growth also outpaced non-STEM job growth with a 26% increase , compared with a 9% increase, respectively, according to the NCSES, which is part of the National Science Foundation.

While STEM jobs are projected to grow , some cracks have started to appear thanks to AI.

A report by Anthropic researchers Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory earlier this year found AI can theoretically take over 94% of computer and math tasks .

Computer programming jobs are among those that are most exposed to AI, the report found .

Leaders at companies like Anthropic that are building the worker-replacing tech are increasingly sounding the alarm about job displacement.