Taylor Lorenz’s Power User
Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

Why Big Tech Wants You to Think AI Is Alive

September 30, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the past few years, Silicon Valley AI companies have begun paying teams of philosophers and scientists to answer one question: Can AI ever become conscious? Anthropic is publishing welfare assessments of its models, Meta is administering personality tests to its software, and AI executives are musing publicly about their products' subjective feelings. All this is happening as neuroscientists who study brains for a living say they remain unconvinced that anything even remotely resembling consciousness could exist inside these systems. As Washington Post tech reporter Natasha Tiku explains, there has been no scientific breakthrough revealing AI might become any more conscious than your microwave — and yet tech leaders have become fixated on the question.

The Long Roots of a Silicon Valley Obsession

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:06) **The Setup: Silicon Valley's New Obsession** - Taylor Lorenz introduces the topic: why Big Tech is suddenly obsessed with AI consciousness, despite no scientific evidence supporting it.
  • 2 (01:50) **Historical Roots of the AI Consciousness Debate** - Natasha traces the idea from the Turing test to modern chatbots, showing the long-standing sci-fi dream of creating conscious machines.
  • 3 (03:08) **The Rationalist/Early AI Safety Movement** - Taylor and Natasha discuss how the "AI safety" movement, with figures like Eliezer Yudkowsky, framed consciousness as a potential threat, though they didn't require it for danger.
  • 4 (05:08) **From Fringe to Mainstream: The Blake Lemoine Story** - Taylor recalls the 2022 Google engineer fired for claiming his chatbot was conscious, and asks what changed to make companies now take this seriously.
  • 5 (07:33) **The Pope's Encyclical and the Christian Summit** - Natasha describes how Anthropic hosted Christian leaders to discuss moral obligations to Claude itself, while the Pope took the opposite stance.
  • 6 (08:25) **The Internal Shift: Executives Leading the Charge** - Natasha reveals that even before ChatGPT, OpenAI and Google executives were publicly musing about AI consciousness, creating a top-down belief among developers.
  • 7 (11:19) **Defining "Model Welfare" and AI Consciousness** - Taylor asks what the tech industry actually means by these terms, and Natasha explains the concept of subjective experience.

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Guests on this episode

Taylor Lorenz

Show Notes

Can AI actually be conscious and why are some of the biggest AI companies in Silicon Valley pushing this idea?

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In this episode of Power User, I talk with Washington Post tech reporter Nitasha Tiku about the growing push inside companies like Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI to study AI consciousness, model welfare, digital minds, and whether systems like Claude could ever experience emotions or suffering.

 

We discuss Anthropic's research into Claude's preferences, emotions, and introspection, the rise of the AI welfare movement, Silicon Valley's fascination with machine consciousness, and why executives are increasingly talking publicly about the possibility that AI systems could have an inner life.

 

But there are much bigger questions at stake. What happens if society begins treating AI systems as people? Could chatbots eventually receive rights or legal personhood? Could companies use the idea of AI agency to avoid responsibility for what their products do? And what does all of this mean when people are already forming intense emotional relationships with chatbots and sometimes believing that their AI is sentient?

We also unpack the history of the idea of conscious machines, from Alan Turing and ELIZA to modern AI safety culture, effective altruism, Anthropic, Claude, ChatGPT, AI psychosis, robot rights, AI personhood, and the increasingly blurry line between software that sounds human and something people believe actually is human.

#AI #Anthropic #Claude #ArtificialIntelligence #OpenAI #ChatGPT #SiliconValley #Tech


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