Anthropic Philosopher Questions AI Consciousness — and Suggests It Might Already Exist

Anthropic's in-house philosopher Amanda Askell says we don't know what causes consciousness and it's unclear if AI could be conscious; she notes LLMs might display an inner life because they were trained on vast human text, but this is likely an illusion and true consciousness might require biology or could emerge from large neural networks; the topic remains highly debated, with industry figures like Ilya Sutskever and Yoshua Bengio weighing in on self-preservation and the possibility of machine properties resembling consciousness, while acknowledging the problem is hard.