‘We don’t know if the models are conscious‘ — Anthropic’s CEO isn’t sure if Claude AI is conscious but he'd probably quite like it if you upgraded to Claude Max just to find out

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei isn't sure whether his latest Claude chatbot is conscious. This probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. After all, last month Anthropic wheeled out a revised version of Claude's Constitution, basically a framework that defines the kind of entity the company wants its premiere AI model to be, that said pretty much the same thing. But seriously? Claude? Conscious? Amodei and everyone else at Anthropic know better than that, right?

Personally, I'm something of a cynic about the status of AI models as moral patients or conscious beings. My instinctive reaction to this kind of superficially innocuous speculation is that it's really just marketing hype designed to exploit the FOMO of potential customers and clients.

In other words, when Amodei recently told the New York Times podcast, "we don’t know if the models ...