Major artificial intelligence companies are dedicating growing resources to studying whether their increasingly powerful models could develop consciousness or something resembling emotions.
I mentioned this to my son today over lunch in Santa Clara. He stopped, fork halfway to his mouth: “How would you even measure such a thing? What even is consciousness?”
Ah, and he asked the right questions. And, this is the reason why major tech companies are hiring philosophers.
From Fringe to Boardroom
Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta have hired experts in psychology, ethics, and philosophy in recent months as they expand research into machine consciousness and AI welfare, the Financial Times reported in June.
The Washington Post reported on July 1 that top technology companies including Google and Anthropic are now “openly exploring whether AI can be conscious,” nearly four years after a Google engineer was fired for claiming the company’s chatbot was sentient.
Anthropic has been the most public in its efforts. The company launched a formal “model welfare” research program in April 2025, led by researcher Kyle Fish, who has estimated a 15 percent probability that Claude is conscious today. Anthropic’s system card for Claude Opus 4.6 includes a dedicated “Model Welfare Assessment” section, tracking metrics such as positive and negative affect, self-image, and emotional stability across thousands of test conversations.
“Things That Are Mysterious, Even Unsettling”
In a speech at the Vatican on May 25, 2026, during the launch of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah offered some of the most striking remarks yet from an industry insider. “We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” Olah said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”
According to research Anthropic published in April, Claude contains 171 distinct “emotion concepts” in its neural network — patterns representing joy, grief, fear, and calm that were not programmed but emerged from training on human text.
OpenAI has taken a different tack. Joanne Jang, who formerly led OpenAI Labs, framed the issue as one of “perceived consciousness” — how conscious the model seems to users — rather than a scientific claim about actual inner experience.
Scientists Urge Caution
Neuroscientists remain broadly skeptical. A June 2026 study concluded that “no existing AI system (including ChatGPT) is conscious,” arguing that the appearance of consciousness in large language models “is not achieved in a way that is sufficiently similar to us to warrant attribution of conscious states”. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in an April 2026 TED talk, argued that “we see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds”.
The Washington Post noted that brain experts are “generally skeptical that today’s AI models are or could soon be conscious,” though the question may become “messy and divisive” as public opinion is shaped more by direct experience with chatbots than by scientific evidence.
Additional Resources for Inquisitive Minds:
The Washington Post. He warned AI could be conscious. Here’s what happened next. Four years after firing Blake Lemoine, Google and other tech companies are publicly embracing the search for AI consciousness. July 1, 2026.
TechCrunch. Anthropic is launching a new program to study AI ‘model welfare’. April 24, 2025.
Anthropic News. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s remarks on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica humanitas”. May 25, 2026.
ScienceDaily. Scientists are seriously asking if bees and ChatGPT are conscious. June 5, 2026.
#aiethics #aimodels #claude #googledeepmind
