Could AI be conscious?
Why This Matters
Key context: <p>Experts believe it’s at least possible. We urgently need a plan to navigate the ethical implications</p><p>In January, the AI company Anthropic published a <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/constitution">new constitution</a> for Claude, its most advanced large language model (LLM), which contained the comment: “We are caught in a difficult position where we neither want to overstate the likelihood of Claude’s moral patienthood nor dismiss it out of hand.” A month later, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei went on a podcast and said his company couldn’t rule out the possibility that Claude was conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”, has said there is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade. And what about Claude itself? When asked during testing to estimate the probability that it is a <em>moral patient</em>, meaning that its wellbeing matters in its own right, it gave numbers ranging from 5% to 40% and stressed how uncertain it was.</p><p>Modern AI systems are extraordinarily complex, and they are advancing fast. In terms of structural complexity and computational scale, by some measures a few are already in the range of a mouse brain, and at recent growth rates, they could reach the range of a human brain within five to 10 years.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/19/could-ai-be-conscious">Continue reading...</a> This development from The Guardian highlights ongoing changes in the sector.
Experts believe it’s at least possible. We urgently need a plan to navigate the ethical implicationsIn January, the AI company Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude, its most advanced large language model (LLM), which contained the comment: “We are caught in a difficult position where we neither want to overstate the likelihood of Claude’s moral patienthood nor dismiss it out of hand.” A month later, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei went on a podcast and said his company couldn’t rule out the possibility that Claude was conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”, has said there is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade. And what about Claude itself? When asked during testing to estimate the probability that it is a moral patient, meaning that its wellbeing matters in its own right, it gave numbers ranging from 5% to 40% and stressed how uncertain it was.Modern AI systems are extraordinarily complex, and they are advancing fast. In terms of structural complexity and computational scale, by some measures a few are already in the range of a mouse brain, and at recent growth rates, they could reach the range of a human brain within five to 10 years. Continue reading...
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