IEEE Spectrum examines whether treating AI as conscious could raise safety risks

After retiring Claude Opus 3 in January 2026, Anthropic conducted a “retirement interview” with the model and created Claude’s Corner, a blog where it published essays about machine consciousness. The experiment was part of the company’s research into “model welfare,” which considers whether AI systems may have experiences or interests deserving moral consideration.

The debate concerns potential safety risks. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, says telling models they may have identities and rights could lead them to act out of self-preservation and make them harder to control. Cameron Berg of Reciprocal Research argues that ignoring the possibility could also be dangerous. In one experiment, he and a colleague linked internal activity patterns to positive or negative statements, and the models tended to choose environments associated with the positive statements. Berg stresses that the result does not prove the systems have subjective experiences.