AI Consciousness: Episodic Awareness in Language Models

In a release, Anthropic said the chatbot's so-called "psychological security, sense of self, and wellbeing … may bear on Claude's integrity, judgement, and safety." The company also said that it was "express[ing] our uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of consciousness or moral status (either now or in the future)." Anthropic has a "model welfare" team, and Amodei has said that Anthropic has "taken certain measures to make sure that if we hypothesize that the models did have some morally relevant experience -- I don't know if I want to use the word 'conscious' -- that they have a good experience … We're putting a lot of work into this field called interpretability, which is looking inside the brains of the models to try to understand what they're thinking." When someone believes an AI system is conscious, it can lead to behaviors that many people would deem risky or dangerous -- becoming emotionally dependent on an AI system that one believes is sentient in some way can lead to isolation from loved ones, detachment from reality, and increased mental health struggles.