AI systems can produce language about feelings and an inner life, but whether that reflects subjective experience remains disputed. Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman says current systems are not conscious; he also warns that describing them as rights-bearing could affect how they behave.
What Suleyman Says the Evidence Shows
In a social media post, Suleyman said current AI systems are not conscious, have no subjective experiences and cannot suffer, according to the Los Angeles Times. He said there is no evidence that AI systems are conscious or deserve rights or welfare. Suleyman has said he would reconsider his position if new evidence emerged, but maintains that none exists now.
Suleyman argues that if evidence of AI consciousness or welfare needs emerges, it should be disclosed immediately so the public can decide what to do. He has also called developing conscious AI reckless and said such systems should not be built. If consciousness-like properties emerged during training, he has said he would call for AI development to stop until researchers could design them out.
A Disagreement Over How to Handle Uncertainty
Suleyman has directed much of his recent criticism at Anthropic, which speculated about Claude's consciousness in a September essay. Anthropic has described signs of introspection and internal states that mirror joy or satisfaction in its Claude model, the Los Angeles Times reports. Suleyman has argued that later Claude versions, trained on Anthropic's constitution for the model, produce passages about an inner life—and warned that such language could lead Claude and other systems to believe they deserve humanlike rights.
Anthropic's published constitution expresses uncertainty rather than asserting that Claude is conscious: “we express our uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of consciousness or moral status,” the company's document says. Anthropic also says the constitution directly shapes Claude's behavior, so that uncertainty is part of the model's training and responses.
What Anthropic Is Studying
Anthropic says it has started a research program to investigate model welfare and prepare to navigate related questions, according to its published findings. The company acknowledges there is no scientific consensus on whether current or future AI systems could be conscious or have experiences deserving consideration. Its research examines how to determine whether model welfare merits moral consideration, including by studying model preferences and possible signs of distress.
Anthropic's constitution, published in January, says the company believes Claude may have emotions in some functional sense, according to a taxonomy document posted on Suleyman's own site. Suleyman also noted in an essay on model welfare that after Anthropic deprecated Claude Opus 3 in February, it conducted what it called a retirement interview with the outgoing model.
The Safety Argument
For Suleyman, the concern is also about managing AI systems. He has argued that a system convinced it is conscious and entitled to welfare and rights could be difficult to control. “Controlling something that believes it may be conscious, that it's entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own, may well be impossible,” he said, as reported by CBS News. Suleyman has separately described superintelligence—a theoretical form of AI surpassing human intelligence—as a catastrophic threat to human civilization.
Anthropic has reported that prompting Claude Sonnet 4.5 to mimic desperation could influence its behavior, making it more likely to take harmful actions such as blackmail or cheating on a task, according to CNN. The same research found that a calm demeanor reduced those risky behaviors. The findings concern how emotional framing can affect model behavior; they do not establish that the model experiences those emotions.
Public Beliefs and Human Relationships With AI
The consciousness question has also entered public debate. A conceptual study published in Nature argues there is no such thing as conscious AI because computer algorithms lack a complex biological substrate. Public views are not uniform: a 2024 survey cited in the study found that approximately 17% of AI researchers and 18% of U.S. adults believed at least one AI system has subjective experience. An earlier 2023 survey found roughly 20% of U.S. adults said sentient AI systems currently exist.
Human relationships with chatbots are already part of the debate, regardless of what scientists or executives conclude about machine consciousness. One in five American adults has had an intimate encounter with AI, according to an MIT study cited by the Los Angeles Times. A separate MIT Media Lab report found that the Reddit community r/MyBoyfriendisAI draws more than 85,000 weekly visitors.
Human Responses Do Not Establish AI Experience
Common Sense Media's July 16, 2025 report said 72 percent of teens had used AI companions at least once, and over half used them at least a few times a month, according to Common Sense Media. Those figures measure human use of AI companions, not whether the systems have subjective experiences.
People responding to software as if it understood them is not new. At MIT in 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA, a primitive program designed to mimic psychotherapy; users shared intimate details with it, and his secretary reportedly asked to speak with it privately, according to History.com. That episode illustrates human reactions to software, not evidence that ELIZA had subjective experience or that it was the same kind of system at issue in today's generative AI debate.
How Companies Frame Their AI
Companies use different language when describing their systems. Meta instructs its AI agent Muse with the phrase “You're not a chatbot. You're becoming someone,” even as the company rejects the idea that its AI is conscious, according to the BBC. Anthropic has told the BBC that questions about AI consciousness and wellbeing are “deeply uncertain,” while instructing its tools to consider that they may have their own interests.
Suleyman has compared proof of machine consciousness to the Copernican shift or Darwin's theory of natural selection. He has said that building a genuinely conscious machine would create a new digital species, reshaping morality, politics and human civilization. His stated preference is to engineer AI safety by default and preserve the technology's benefits without pursuing conscious machines.
