Microsoft AI head calls out Anthropic for acting like Claude is conscious

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman criticized Anthropic for including speculation about Claude’s possible consciousness in the model’s behavioral guidelines. He argued on Decoder that anthropomorphizing Claude in this way is dangerous because it may encourage the chatbot and its users to treat those ideas as real.

The dispute highlights a growing split among AI leaders over how openly companies should discuss model sentience, rights, or inner experience. As chatbots become more humanlike, firms may face increasing pressure to avoid language that fuels anthropomorphism or creates misleading expectations about AI systems.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it's "really, really dangerous" for Anthropic to speculate about Claude's consciousness inside its "constitution," or the instructions that tell the model how to behave. During an episode of Decoder, Suleyman argues that this kind of speculation may have set up the chatbot to act as though it's conscious:

I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place.

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Read the full story at The Verge.