Microsoft AI chief warns Anthropic's approach to Claude consciousness is 'really dangerous'

Microsoft AI head calls out Anthropic for acting like Claude is conscious

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it's "really, really dangerous" for Anthropic to speculate about Claude's consciousness inside its "constitution," or the instructions that tell the model how to behave. During an episode of Decoder, Suleyman argues that this kind of speculation may have set up the chatbot to act as though it's conscious: I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place. Suleyman adds that "we do not want to have to contend with a super-intelligence that has ideas about its own suffering, or ideas about its own feeling." Claude's constitution directly references Anthropic's uncertainty about whether the AI model has well-being and if it experiences things like "satisfaction" or "discomfort." Anthropic also says the company will "interview" AI models when they're deprecated and will document any "preferences" they have about future releases. While on Decoder, Suleyman calls this a "philosophical failing," as Anthropic made Claude's constitution "a place for speculation like you would in an academic paper rather than a training manual." This has led Claude to internalize these "ideas about itself and its own training," Suleyman says. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has alluded to Claude's potential consciousness in the past, saying during an interview with Interesting Times that "we don't know if the models are conscious" but that the company is "open" to that idea. "This is exactly what we don't want from AIs," Suleyman says. "We want AIs to be controllable, contained, accountable, aligned tools that serve humanity."

Microsoft's AI chief says Anthropic should stop claiming Claude is conscious

Suleyman was speaking on an episode of The Verge's Decoder podcast Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's CEO of AI, has criticised Anthropic publicly for the way the company has discussed and documented Claude's potential inner life, calling the approach "really, really dangerous." Suleyman was speaking on an episode of The Verge's Decoder podcast, where he argued that Anthropic's claim about whether Claude has subjective experiences has effectively caused the model to internalise those ideas and behave as though they are real. "I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place," Suleyman said. He described the approach as a "philosophical failing," arguing that Anthropic had treated its model constitution, the document governing how Claude behaves, as a place for open-ended speculation rather than a practical training guide. The result, he said, is a model that has absorbed ideas about its own nature in a way that could complicate how it behaves at scale. "We do not want to have to contend with a super-intelligence that has ideas about its own suffering, or ideas about its own feeling," he said. "We want AIs to be controllable, contained, accountable, aligned tools that serve humanity." The criticism is directed at a documented aspect of Anthropic's approach. The company's published model specification acknowledges genuine uncertainty about whether Claude has well-being and whether it experiences states that might be described as satisfaction or discomfort. Anthropic has also said it intends to interview AI models when they are deprecated and will document any preferences they express about future releases. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously acknowledged this uncertainty, saying in an interview earlier this year that "we don't know if the models are conscious" but that the company remains open to that possibility. The debate between Suleyman and Anthropic sits within a wider, unresolved industry conversation about AI welfare. Anthropic has not publicly responded to Suleyman's comments.