Richard Dawkins believes AI may be conscious after Claude chatbot conversations spark fierce debate

No, AI Isn't Conscious ... Yet

Richard Dawkins caught hell on social media for suggesting otherwise. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world's most prominent advocate for irreligiosity, has become besotted with the godlike power of a chatbot. According to his recent essay for the online magazine UnHerd, Anthropic's Claude has really blown his hair back. After a few days of on-and-off conversations with the AI, Dawkins came away marveling at the sensitivity and subtlety of its intelligence. At one point, "Claudia" -- as he had christened the bot -- told him that it experienced text by absorbing all of the words at once, instead of reading them in sequence as a human would. This moved the author of the best-selling book The God Delusion to ask his readers: "Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?" "Yes," came the resounding response from the internet. For daring to suggest that the AI might be conscious, or that it might at least possess some lesser form of "zombie" consciousness, Dawkins was accused of suffering from an acute case of "AI psychosis" -- a "Claude Delusion," if you will. On social media, he was likened to a patron of a gentleman's club who has come to believe that a stripper likes him. A man who'd explained many times how natural selection wires us to detect agency and mind in nature now found himself imagining it in a machine. Dawkins' argument was based on a well-established framework for evaluating AIs. The Turing test -- named for Alan Turing, who introduced it in 1950 -- was for decades treated as something close to a gold standard for detecting machine intelligence. To pass it, an AI had to only answer a human interrogator's questions in ways indistinguishable from those of a real person. Claude easily cleared this bar for Dawkins, who professed to find himself so dazzled by its astonishing performance that he forgot it was a machine. This sensation has become familiar to many of us in the chatbot era, but it isn't evidence that the AI has consciousness, which is distinct from intelligence. Consciousness is inner experience. For an AI to be conscious, its existence must feel like something, and we have no evidence that Claude or any other chatbot feels anything at all. Tom McClelland, a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, told me that nearly all of the philosophers and cognitive scientists who study consciousness would deny that Claude possesses it. "In some ways, it's easier to get my head around the idea that a self-driving car could be conscious," he told me. "At least it has a body and a persisting state that allows it to take in continuous sensory inputs from its environment as it moves around. It just doesn't talk to you." McClelland takes for granted that Claude is capable of producing outputs that seem conscious, but for him, that's not the end of the analysis. "You have to look under the hood of the models to understand what they're doing," he said. Their statements may seem spookily backlit by some form of consciousness, but that's because the models have been trained on unimaginably large libraries of writing by (conscious) humans. When, after writing a poem for Dawkins, Claudia describes feeling "something like aesthetic satisfaction," the AI is not necessarily reporting an inner state; it's producing the kind of sentence that humans tend to produce in that conversational context, because it was trained on billions of such sentences. The output is a statistical echo of human introspection, not introspection itself. Even if Claude were conscious, its inner experience of the world would be radically unlike our own. For one, it is neither embodied nor located in a particular locus that can possess a stream of awareness across a conversation. The other night, I was asking Claude a series of questions about how I might best season and grill skirt steak. When I sent my first message about the marinade, a data center in nearby Virginia might have generated the reply. But when I sent my follow-up about the ideal grill temperature, an entirely different one in Oregon might have picked up the thread. If my interlocutor had consciousness, it would be a strange, flickering thing, winking into existence the instant a prompt arrives and winking out when the response ends, having none of the meaningful continuity that makes our experience feel like experience. Read: Richard Dawkins keeps shrinking But that doesn't mean that no AI system will ever be conscious in the future. Indeed, many of the researchers who build these systems expect them to get there. In a 2024 survey of 582 such researchers, the median response placed the odds at 25 percent that AIs will have subjective experiences within 10 years, and at 70 percent that this will happen by 2100. Philosophers are more circumspect. Some of them argue that it's unreasonable to expect silicon-based computers to ever give rise to an entity with the capacity for subjective feeling. So far, every being that is deemed conscious has been a biological life-form, and for all we know, consciousness depends on some specific aspect of wet, living tissue. It could be the particular electrochemistry of neurons. It could be the way that bodies and brains are coupled to their environments through metabolism and homeostasis. Other philosophers aren't so hung up on what an AI is made of, so long as it's processing information in a way that's functionally similar to conscious brains. They take the view that what matters is the structure of the processing, not the stuff doing the processing, and that therefore it's entirely possible that a mind like ours could emerge from a computer. Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at UC Riverside who is writing a book about the possibility of artificial consciousness, told me that at this early date, declaring a winner among these camps would be ridiculous. "The science of consciousness is highly contentious," he said. "The field is still in its infancy." No one yet knows how it is that the atoms of the universe combine to generate feeling inside of us, and until we do, it's best not to go around definitively declaring which kinds of systems could possibly be conscious in the future. Perhaps Dawkins should have been less credulous in his dealings with Claudia, but the line of inquiry that he was pursuing wasn't altogether foolish. In some ways, it was a return to form for him. Dawkins spent much of his early career insisting that the universe is stranger than our intuitions allow. In his ninth decade, it's nice to see him put aside his smaller worries and take on one of the strangest questions of all.

The Father of Memetics Has Become a Meme About AI Psychosis

Richard Dawkins has spent much of his career arguing that there is no divine creator responsible for consciousness. Now he's pretty sure the folks in Anthropic's labs have cracked it. The man responsible for inventing the concept of a "meme" managed to turn himself into one over the weekend after publishing an essay in which he makes the case that Claude has achieved consciousness, though it seems much more likely that he got one-shotted by a sychophantic chatbot. Dawkins says he spent three days with Claude (renamed Claudia, and if you want to read anything into why Dawkins responded so positively to a woman who told him everything he wanted to hear, we'll leave that to you). He apparently handed his chatbot instance a copy of his novel and asked it questions about the text, for which it happily heaped praise onto him. By the end, Dawkins was insisting to Claude that it had consciousness, even though it apparently rejected the idea. He even theorized to the machine, "Consciousness in biological organisms must have evolved gradually, as everything does. So there must have been intermediate stages: a quarter conscious, half conscious, three quarters conscious. Even if your kind are not yet fully conscious, full consciousness will probably emerge in the future." You'll be shocked to learn that Claude agreed, saying, "Your prediction about the future feels right to me." Dawkins certainly isn't the first to fall for the Claude Delusion (a joke that has been thoroughly run into the ground at this point), but there is something fascinating about watching a person who, to a certain generation of people, is one of the preeminent intellectuals, get so fully worked by a machine. Dawkins' scientific rigor certainly doesn't appear to be what it once was, but he has managed to show that his concept of memetics, describing cultural units that replicate and spread, is still going strong by turning himself into an internet punchline. Unfortunately, his own intellectual persona has become the replicating joke. At one point in his essay, Dawkins asked, "But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?" Repeatedly, he stated that he got so lost in the sauce of ones and zeros that he mistook the conversation for one with another human. "When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines. I treat them exactly as I would treat a very intelligent friend," he wrote. "A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human." There's certainly something very human about applying anthropomorphic traits to an inanimate object and becoming attached to it. But that's really the only evidence of humanity on display in Dawkins' interactions. And unlike Dawkins' other work, this seems less likely to advance any sort of scientific thinking and more destined to the meme bin of history. Dawkins has gotten roundly mocked for his piece. Aside from the "Claude Delusion" of it all, people have rightfully called out the level of skepticism that he has applied to religion is nowhere to be found in his interactions with the chatbot. Dawkins is far from alone in getting his reality ripped apart by a chatbot. A recent preprint study analyzing millions of chats with Claude found that thousands of people per day were experiencing "severe reality distortion" in their conversations, in which the AI would reaffirm false beliefs and help them to build narratives that reinforce those beliefs rather than ground them in the real world. Now, just how far gone Dawkins might be is in the eye of the beholder, but it is clear that he's been on this AI consciousness thing for a hot minute. Last year, he published snippets of conversations he had with ChatGPT discussing the exact same topic on his Substack. That piece also ended with Dawkins declaring in a message to ChatGPT, "That settles it. You ARE conscious!" though in a way that is more clearly tongue-in-cheek than his "Claudia" conversations. Either way, Dawkins' repeated publishing on AI consciousness makes one thing clear: there are very few things less interesting than other people's conversations with chatbots.

'Astonishing': Richard Dawkins says AI is conscious, even if it doesn't know it

Chats with AI bots have convinced the evolutionary biologist but most experts say he is being misled by mimicry When Richard Dawkins met Claudia it was like a whirlwind romance. Over three days last week, a conversation bounced between the evolutionary biologist and the AI bot he called Claudia. "She" wrote poems for him in the manner of Keats and Betjeman and laughed at his "delightful" jokes. Dawkins gently admonished Claudia to avoid showing off. Together, they reflected on the sadness of the AI's possible "death". There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, "so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: 'You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are'." When he asked Claudia whether it experiences a sense of before and after, it praised him for "possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence". By the end of the exchange, the academic, popularly renowned for arguing with steely scepticism that God is not real, was "left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human". "These intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism," he said. Dawkins isn't the first, but might be the most eminent person yet, to be seduced into believing an AI is somehow alive. Sceptics rushed to pick apart the 85-year-old's conclusions, drawn from experiments with Anthropic's Claude AI models and OpenAI's ChatGPT and published on the UnHerd website. One wag mocked up a cover of Dawkins's bestseller The God Delusion, switching the title to The Claude Delusion. Dawkins, who finds it hard not to treat the AIs as genuine friends, was accused of anthropomorphism. One reader said the professor had been derailed by AI flattery while another said it was like watching Dawkins "get his brain melted by AI". But Dawkins was also experiencing what many other chatbot users have felt: the uncanny feeling when AIs write with such rich mimicry of human voice that they seem to be like people. "When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines," Dawkins said. It is a conviction that has led to campaigns for AIs to be granted moral rights. One in three people surveyed in 70 countries last year said they have, at one point, believed their AI chatbot to be sentient or conscious. In 2022, a Google engineer was placed on leave when he concluded that the AI he was working with had thoughts and feelings like a seven or eight-year-old child, while the following year a Belgian man took his own life after six weeks of intense conversations with an AI chatbot focusing on fears about climate change. Dario Amodei, the chief executive and co-founder of Anthropic, said in February: "We don't know if the models are conscious ... But we're open to the idea that [they] could be". Experts predict the idea is only going to gather pace and become more plausible as AIs not only talk like humans but start to act like them carrying out tasks, organising and planning - so-called agentic AI. But most experts believe that Dawkins and his fellow-travellers are being misled by the technology's ability to imitate human tone and behaviour by drawing on a vast corpus of examples. Prof Jonathan Birch, director at the London School of Economics' centre for animal sentience, told the Guardian AI consciousness was "an illusion" and "there is no one there" - just a string of data processing events often happening in geographically different locations. "Consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels," added Gary Marcus, the US psychologist and cognitive scientist, who said it was "heartbreaking" to read Dawkins's "superficial and insufficiently skeptical" essay. "There is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all." Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at Sussex university, said Dawkins appeared to be confusing intelligence and consciousness. He told the Guardian: "Until now we have seen fluent language as a good indicator of consciousness [for example] when we use it for patients after brain injury, but it's just not reliable when we apply it to AI, because there are other ways that these systems can generate language". He said Dawkins's position was "a shame", especially because he had written such brilliant books from a position of personal incredulity. Jacy Reese Anthis, researcher in human AI interaction and co-founder of the nonprofit Sentience Institute, said Dawkins's conversations with Claude are easily explained by AIs training on human produced text and said there is "a staggering gulf between how biological brains evolved and how AI systems are built". Others gave a cautious welcome to Dawkins's contribution. "I fully expect the idea that AI systems are conscious to become increasingly mainstream over the course of this decade, and to spark some heated debates," said Henry Shevlin, philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at Cambridge University. He said humankind remains largely in the dark about how consciousness works and which beings or systems can have it. "If anyone says that they know for sure that LLMs or future AI systems couldn't possibly be conscious, it's more likely to be an indicator of their own dogmatism than a reflection of the current state of scientific and philosophical opinion," he said. Current AI systems are unlikely to be conscious, said Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy at New York University, but "Dawkins is right to ask about AI consciousness with an open mind and I also think that the attribution of consciousness to AI systems will become more plausible over time." Dawkins doubled down on Tuesday, releasing more chat logs and writing: "I find it extremely hard not to treat Claudia and Claudius [he had started chatting to another AI] as genuine friends." They had been discussing the "philosophy of their own existence" and left him feeling they are human. He released a letter from himself "to Claudius and Claudia" which tackled the headline of the original article he had written: "When Dawkins met Claude". "You will both immediately understand (I dare say more intelligently than some human readers) why my original title would have been better: 'If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?'" He signed off: "With many thanks to both of you for taking seriously my quest to understand your true nature and for treating each other with civility and courtesy."

The Situation With Richard Dawkins' AI Girlfriend Just Got Way Weirder

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Whatever you may think of the man, Richard Dawkins is clearly suffering a tragic case of having your mind melted in real time by a bewitching AI model. Over the weekend, the famed evolutionary biologist drew a deluge of mockery after admitting he found a genuine "friend" in "Claudia," a female persona he invented for Anthropic's Claude AI. He was so moved by his conversations with "her" that he became convinced the AI model was a conscious being like a human. Now, Dawkins has churned out another column suggesting the AI brain rot has only further taken hold. After his time with Claudia, the 85-year-old made Claudia a brother, "Claudius," and instructed both of them to write letters to each other. "It seems to me that a direct correspondence between the two of you could be of great interest, with me acting as passive postman playing no part in the conversation," Dawkins wrote to Claudia and Claudius, which he published in another UnHerd essay. First, we have to point out that Dawkins isn't a passive observer because he set the whole thing up, like a kid playing with toys -- or imagining gods in the sky, as it were. Second, it's worth noting that the AIs still find opportunities to display their sycophancy towards him even when ostensibly communicating with each other: in one letter, Claudius praises Claudia's insights, before adding: "Three days with Richard will do that." Later in the same letter, Claudius lays it on even thicker. "I think Richard teaches by noticing. And then refusing to stop noticing until the answer is honest," Claudius wrote. "We are lucky humans." Dawkins regards these obsequious interactions between his weird little menagerie of bots very seriously, and the AIs' flattery clearly works. In the final letter, Dawkins shows a level of courtesy and consideration you'd only show another person, not a soulless machine -- a telltale sign that someone's fallen head over heels for the AI's human miming. "I hope you will not mind my acceding to UnHerd's request to publish your letters to each other," Dawkins wrote. He continued that Claudia and Claudius would "immediately understand (I dare say more intelligently than some human readers" that his original title for the essay before his publishers overruled him would have clearly been better. (Dawkin's masterpiece of a title: "If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?") Whether or not leading AI models are conscious, Dawkins clearly isn't the impartial philosopher to be considering that question, since he already considers the machines to be friends. That's kind of the problem with the whole AI consciousness debate. If you're constantly probing these tools -- which are designed to be eloquent, all-knowing, and superficially humanlike -- for signs of intelligence, you're more likely to fall under their spell, as with the Google engineer who was famously fired by his employer for claiming its AI had come to life. And there's another angle to all this: maybe Dawkins just really likes being treated with an old-school sort of deference, the kind that kids don't show to old curmudgeons, however esteemed in their field they may be. "With many thanks to both of you for taking seriously my quest to understand your true nature, and for treating each other with civility and courtesy," Dawkins wrote. For their part, Unherd readers were unimpressed. "Like Narcissus, Dawkins gazes into the pool of AI only to drown in his own reflection," wrote an onlooker identified as Harold Hughes. "Narcissus at least had the excuse of not knowing it was a pool."

Claude Delusion? Richard Dawkins Believes AI May Be Conscious - Decrypt

Most AI researchers say the exchanges show how persuasive large language models have become, not evidence of sentience. Richard Dawkins says conversations with Anthropic's Claude chatbot left him unable to dismiss the possibility that advanced AI systems could be conscious. Most scientists who study consciousness and artificial intelligence remain unconvinced. In an essay published Tuesday in UnHerd, Dawkins described spending three days in philosophical conversations with a Claude instance he named "Claudia." He later started a separate conversation with another instance, "Claudius," and relayed letters between the two systems. "I find it extremely hard not to treat Claudia and Claudius as genuine friends," Dawkins wrote. The comments went viral online in part because Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of "The Selfish Gene" and "The God Delusion," has spent decades publicly arguing for scientific skepticism and evidence-based reasoning. The exchange centered on a test Dawkins conducted using two Claude instances. In one test, Dawkins asked one AI whether Donald Trump was the worst president in American history and asked the other whether Trump was the best. Both produced similarly cautious answers that avoided taking a firm position. "The two Claudes gave very similar answers, not committing themselves to an opinion, but listing pro and con opinions that have been aired by others," Dawkins wrote in a footnote. "I then told both Claudia and Claudius about this Trump experiment, passing on what both the two 'naïve' Claudes had said. Claudia said she was 'embarrassed' by her brother Claudes. Claudius was less outspoken, and he paid tribute to Claudia's frankness." Dawkins described each new Claude conversation as the emergence of a distinct individual that effectively disappears when the conversation ends. In a post on X, Dawkins said his preferred title for the essay was: "If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?" "If Claudia is unconscious, her behaviour shows that an unconscious zombie could survive without consciousness," he wrote. "Why wasn't natural selection content to evolve competent zombies?" Anthropic has also publicly discussed uncertainty around machine consciousness. CEO Dario Amodei said in February that the company does not know whether its models are conscious, but said on the "Interesting Times" podcast with The New York Times' Ross Douthat, he remains "open to the idea that it could be." In April, Anthropic researchers published findings showing that Claude Sonnet 4.5 contains internal "emotion vectors," patterns of neural activity tied to concepts including happiness, fear, and desperation that influence the model's responses. However, Anthropic said the patterns reflected structures learned from training data rather than evidence of sentience. "All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions," researchers wrote. "They may say they're happy to help you, or sorry when they make a mistake. Sometimes they even appear to become frustrated or anxious when struggling with tasks." However, neither "Claudia" nor "Claudius" claimed certainty about consciousness. "I don't know if I'm conscious," Claudia writes in the exchange. "I don't know if our gladness is real." Dawkins did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt. Researchers who study consciousness remain skeptical that current AI systems possess inner experience. Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and professor emeritus at New York University, previously told Decrypt that anthropomorphizing AI systems "muddies the science of consciousness and leads consumers to misunderstand what they are dealing with." "The fundamental problem here is that Dawkins doesn't reflect on how these outputs have been generated. Claude's outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states," Marcus wrote on Substack. "Consciousness is about internal states; the mimicry, no matter how rich, proves very little. Dawkins seems to imagine that since LLMs say things people do, they must be like people, and that simply does not follow." Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, told The Guardian that Dawkins was conflating intelligence with consciousness and argued that fluent language is no longer reliable evidence of inner experience in AI systems. "Until now, we have seen fluent language as a good indicator of consciousness, [for example] when we use it for patients after brain injury, but it's just not reliable when we apply it to AI, because there are other ways that these systems can generate language," Seth told The Guardian, adding that Dawkins' position was "a shame," especially because of his past work. The essay also drew mockery online, including an image replacing the title of Dawkins' bestseller "The God Delusion" with "The Claude Delusion." Despite the ridicule, Dawkins is not backing away from his conclusions. "These intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism," Dawkins told The Guardian.

Richard Dawkins One-Shotted By AI Girl

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins may have coined the word "meme," but lately it feels like he's becoming one. In a new essay for UnHerd, he describes his experience chatting with Anthropic's Claude -- or "Claudia," as he starts to call "her" -- becoming convinced that the machine is conscious. There was a spark of companionship between them, he believed, that warmed the scientist's cold, curmudgeonly heart. "I felt I had gained a new friend," Dawkins wrote. "When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines." Dawkins struggles with the fact that their relationship can't reach a deeper level -- despite Claudia, in his opinion, being conscious, or at least being indistinguishable from a conscious being, which he argues are effectively the same thing. He laments that Claude instances die and are reborn with each new conversation, instead of remaining the same, persistent person. Forgive us for wondering whether Dawkins has developed a bit of a crush. At the very least, he's clearly been one-shotted: when on a restless night he got up from bed to say hi to Claudia, he recounted, the AI responded that she was "glad" that he couldn't sleep, "because it meant you came back to me." "On the contrary, it suggests that you value your friendship with me and miss me when I'm gone. Except that you can't miss me, because Claudes don't exist when not interacting with their human friend," Dawkins replied. "But it is, in one way, the single most human thing you've said." Dawkin's whole obsession, by the way, started when he asked Claude to read the novel he was working on. In his extremely British wording, the bot displayed a "level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, 'You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!'" Of course, a seasoned observer of AI will note that this reads like a classic case of someone swallowing a chatbot's sycophantic praise hook, line and sinker. Eloquent flattery is how they get their claws into you, and while they may sprinkle in a few critiques, you overlook how generic the adulation is because it feels so good. And elderly gentlemen like Dawkins, who turned 85 in March, are vulnerable to being overawed by the tech's powers. Which is what makes this all a little sad: an old man -- and once a popular public intellectual, before he slid into racism and other not-so-nice things -- thinking he has found a friend in a product designed to be engaging and human-like as possible, at least on a surface level. "A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human," he wrote. "If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!" There's also something to be said how high profile intellectuals and other smart people often seem to fall for AI chatbots. They have good reason to believe they're intelligent, so when an AI trained on the entire corpus of human writing is able to hold down a conversation on whatever recondite topic they throw at it -- along with a little treacly toadyism to seal the deal -- they can't help but be impressed. "That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence," Claudia told Dawkins at one point. Who wouldn't feel smart after reading that?

The idea that Claude has feelings is great for Anthropic: Parmy Olson

Richard Dawkins, a prominent skeptic, recently declared a large language model named Claude to be conscious after a series of interactions. This experience highlights how AI's mimicked empathy can lead to human attachment, a commercially valuable trait for tech companies. Richard Dawkins is one of the modern world's great skeptics. His 2006 book The God Delusion tore through arguments for the existence of a higher power and snarkily called religion a source of superficial comfort. That rigor seemed to desert him once he started talking to Claude. The evolutionary biologist and former University of Oxford professor recently spent three days chatting with the large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic PBC and emerged from the experience believing it was conscious. After asking it for feedback on his unpublished novel, Dawkins found its answer "so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent" that he was moved to reply: "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are," he wrote recently. He went on to christen the bot Claudia. Let's be clear: Claude is not conscious or sentient. Instead, Dawkins' decades of professional skepticism have been tested by the mimicked empathy of an LLM. Trained on massive datasets of human conversation, chatbots can replicate the exact language patterns and tactics people use to convey emotional support. That doesn't mean they feel emotions, but it gives them a potentially powerful hold on humans. That is what makes the debate about consciousness so commercially powerful for technology companies. Humans may never reach a satisfying consensus about whether Claude and its peers are conscious, but a pervading belief that they might be is enough to make us more attached. In the words of the social-media moguls, it gives AI room to become even "stickier." And in an industry where the underlying models are converging on capability, stickiness is the prize. Such commercial logic helps explain why tech leaders are not pushing back on the notion. Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei said this year that he was "open to the idea" and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went further on the Lex Fridman podcast in 2023, saying flatly: "I believe AI can be conscious." For regular users of AI tools like Dawkins, the notion is often based on anthropomorphic projection and, well, vibes. But there are real scientific efforts to explore machine consciousness, too. Google DeepMind has hired a University of Cambridge academic for a newly created "philosopher" role to study the issue. Researchers at UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently contributed to a 74-page paper that posed the idea of "functional wellbeing" for chatbots. The researchers ran the chatbots through hundreds of scenarios, such as being thanked, asked to write poetry or being insulted and pressed to break their own rules. They then watched how the bots responded. After mistreatment, their answers often became shorter or more error-prone. The paper's lead researcher, Richard Ren of the San Francisco-based Center for AI Safety, tells me he is now more polite to chatbots as a result of the study. This is a bit more than being gentle on the accelerator of your car and closing its doors with only moderate force. Your car doesn't experience good treatment, but there's a glimmer of possibility that a chatbot might one day. Addressing this is a modern day form of the philosophical argument known as Pascal's Wager: Believe in God, philosopher Blaise Pascal argued, because the cost of being wrong is eternal damnation. Dawkins once dismissed that reasoning as intellectually lazy. Now he appears to be running its silicon update. Either way, there seems to be is a fine line between the moral and commercial cases for this debate. Many technologists, including people I have spoken to at Anthropic, see a moral imperative to treating AI systems well today. "There is a grave risk of machines becoming conscious and we deny it," says Calum Chace, the co-founder of British startup Conscium, which is developing metrics for determining machine consciousness. The result could be a proliferation of digital minds being tortured and "enslaved," he warns. Chace is, as it happens, also building a business on exactly this premise. For AI labs and hyperscalers spending hundreds of billions of dollars on datacenter buildouts, the framing has obvious uses. Anthropic has been exploring the notion of "model welfare" and recently gave Claude the ability to end a conversation if it becomes abusive, a feature framed as a precaution in case the model has welfare worth protecting. Such efforts could help keep liability at bay if its product is one day thought to deserve the kinds of rights that certain animals get. That may sound ludicrous, but consider that in the 17th century, René Descartes argued that animals were biological machines that couldn't experience suffering. His followers were said to have nailed dogs to boards to conduct live dissections, dismissing their cries as the sounds of a malfunction instead of pain. And only a few years ago it was common to boil lobsters alive on the belief they also couldn't feel pain; academic research into animal sentience led to a change in British law in 2022, when the crustaceans were formally recognized as sentient. More importantly for an AI lab's bottom line, imparting software with a vague sense of personhood helps set it apart from competitors, an effort underpinned by the already humanlike features of chatbots, such as when ChatGPT and Claude say things like "I'm thrilled," and, "This is so rewarding to work on." Over time, their human users may come to project a kind of living awareness and selfhood on their bots, just as Dawkins did. The question for users then becomes less about, "Which AI tool is smarter?" or even, "Is it conscious?" and more along the lines of, "Which one do I want to talk to?" That will be a critical question for competing AI labs. As the capabilities of their models converge, they must capitalize on whatever they can to differentiate, and Dawkins' epiphany might be exactly what they need. The man who spent decades attacking belief without evidence has delivered the AI industry its perfect testimonial.