Anthropic bans ‘cruel’ behaviour against its Claude AI

"We don't know if the models are conscious…But we're open to the idea that it could be," Amodei said.Science fiction and popular culture have been fascinated for decades by the boundary between technology and human intelligence, but asking whether AI is conscious may be the wrong question, according to Jackson Stakeman, a general manager at Sparq, an Atlanta-based AI services provider.

We can't prove it in each other.

Debate it for AI and you go in circles," Stakeman told AFP."The mirror is a better metaphor.

These systems reflect what we put in, at scale.

That's reason enough for the policy change" at Anthropic, he added.Some have rejected the idea of machine consciousness outright, including Pope Leo XIV and Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman."AIs are not conscious.

They do not feel, experience, or suffer," Suleyman wrote in an essay last month.

"Granting rights and moral protections to a technological entity, one that looks to be on a path to be seismically more capable and intelligent than us, is a recipe for disaster," he wrote.In a sermon delivered in Italian on Thursday at St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, the pope suggested machines lack a soul, saying they merely "compile data" quickly.

Anthropic bans 'cruel' behaviour against its Claude AI AFP | Updated 2 hours ago | Policy does not explicitly cite 'model welfare', comes amid philosophical debate over machine consciousness.

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