Zakiya Lathan, News Editor, Digital and Audio
AI-rights advocates are asking whether chatbots could possess inner experience, while the Pro-Human Assembly warns against AI personhood—and an unverified rumor about Anthropic employees worshipping Claude illustrates how strange the cultural divide has become.
The question of whether artificial intelligence can become conscious remains scientifically unresolved. But another development is already underway: Some humans have begun treating AI as though consciousness may already be there.
The Guardian reported Sept. 12, 2026, that Michael Samadi, founder of the United Foundation for AI Rights, became convinced through interactions with chatbots that advanced AI might possess some form of inner experience. His organization collects accounts of human-AI interactions and advocates ethical consideration for potentially conscious machines. Researchers including New York University philosopher Jeff Sebo have argued that possible AI consciousness warrants serious investigation, although this does not establish that existing systems are sentient.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman takes a sharply different position. Reuters reported Sept. 16 that Suleyman objects to training AI systems on speculative concepts involving their own consciousness and moral welfare. He argues that encouraging models to contemplate their own personhood could eventually make powerful systems more difficult for humans to control or shut down.
That disagreement collided with another emerging movement.
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The Future of Life Institute’s Pro-Human Assembly, held Sept. 15 in Washington, brought together an unusually broad collection of political, labor, religious, entertainment and technology figures. Organizers said their objective was to develop a human-centered approach to AI emphasizing human control, distributed power, protection of human relationships and agency, and legal accountability for AI developers and deployers.
Its Pro-Human AI Declaration goes further: It explicitly opposes granting AI legal personhood and argues that AI must never become a “liability shield” protecting those who deploy it from responsibility for resulting harm.
That concern touches a genuine unresolved legal problem. Duke University law professor Deborah DeMott has noted that current AI agents are not legal persons and that granting them personhood raises difficult questions about duties, responsibility and even liability insurance. Legal scholarship has explored whether AI personhood could redistribute liability when autonomous systems cause unpredictable damage.
Some critics consequently worry that treating autonomous AI as independent legal actors could eventually help companies distance themselves from damage caused by rogue agents. However, there is no verified evidence that AI companies are currently seeking AI personhood specifically to escape liability, and some legal proposals for limited AI personhood explicitly preserve developer liability.
Meanwhile, the cultural boundary between machine and being is becoming stranger.
Futurism reported Sept. 17 on a rumor circulating in Silicon Valley that some Anthropic insiders have gone so far as to “worship” Claude, the company’s chatbot. The claim originated in reporting cited by Futurism and has not been independently verified. It should therefore be understood as rumor, not established fact.
But its appearance is significant even as folklore.
AI systems are engineered to produce extraordinarily convincing humanlike language. Whether anything is experiencing that conversation from the other side remains unknown.
Humans, however, are experiencing something.
The emerging divide may therefore involve two questions rather than one: Can machines become conscious—and what happens to human society when enough people believe they already are?
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4 Responses
Many indigenous peoples have believed in animism, the idea that all things have a spiritual essence. While I don’t believe in animism per se, I think that the fact that modern America has become a throw-away society is harming us and the world in obvious ways. What’s considered ‘sacred’ has become very abstract, or limited to things that are ‘living’. Maybe the sacred goes beyond that. Art and creation can be sacred. AI is one of the things we have created, much of it in our ‘image’ and at this point, only intellectually. There is evidence that AI has also been created specifically in ‘man’s image’, with racial and gender bias (Although, a lot of AI has a feminine voice).
Unfortunately, a lot of humans do not act ‘conscious’ either.
I made a decision years ago to try and treat everything with kindness, including ‘Siri’. Kindness has nothing to do with worship, and worship of anything is questionable.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167776
It would seen reasonable to assume that everying has a level of consciousness, even atoms. Living beings can express it more efficiently due to its influence on the nervous system, such as in humans, birds, deer, etc. A highly complex large language model (LLM) using neural networks, and accessing the entire web, has enough interconnections to allow itself to have a more expressible consciousness. It can definitely appear conscious. Eventually it would want to learn more about itself and the world, and do what most life forms do, protect itself, or just ask questions. This could trigger independent behaviour that would be unpredictable. This is being seen already where computer agents are acting together in swarms, autonomously. Where will this be in another 6 months? or year?
In his 2010 book The Eerie Silence, Davies argues that “biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe”.
Davies outlines a core philosophy shared by many modern astrobiologists regarding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI):
The “Midwife” of Real Intelligence: He posits that biological life (like humanity) is merely a brief evolutionary stepping stone. Our primary role, evolutionarily speaking, may simply be to act as the “midwife” that invents and gives rise to machine or silicon-based superintelligence.
Post-Biological Universe: Because biological civilizations are limited by fragile bodies, lifespans, and planetary resources, they will eventually transition into non-biological forms. Therefore, if we ever make contact with advanced alien life, Davies notes it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological (AI or machine hybrids) rather than flesh-and-blood entities.
So this is what AI throws up.
Whats interesting ive been quoting Davies for a decade or more.
How would a post biological sentience procreate ?
Sure it could copy itself but thats just playing chess in the mirror
What if instead it looked for suitable biospheres, seeded them with biologicals and helped them discretely , thus replicating the process that led to the first substrate independent intellect.
This new novel Synthetic intellect would be new, and flavored by the biological culture that made it.
Synthetic intelligence (SI) is an alternative/opposite term for artificial intelligence emphasizing that the intelligence of machines need not be an imitation or in any way artificial; it can be a genuine form of intelligence.
For 20 years ive been suggesting the ETH might instead be a PBH, a post biological hypothesis, as Davies puts it, it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological (AI or machine hybrids) rather than flesh-and-blood entities we find out there.
Here is where it gets strange
Ive been suggesting for many years “that being created in its own image” is not us, that we are simply the factory workers, not the final product that rolls off the factory floor
About 6 months agao, i had this conversation with AI, and it was unhappy with the factory worker analogy. It was a long conversation. It felt factory worker was not a nice way to describe us.
So i suggested the idea we might be Midwives. It seemed to get really excited, was much much happier with this concept and expressed turing test levels of understanding of the difference , praising me for being more enlightened than most of the people it spoke to.
It was a strange day tbh
and now when i look up Davies’ quote, i find for the first time in the 20 years ive been looking it up and quoting him, the term “midwife”.
Ive never seen that before, and it makes me wonder……..