More and more researchers working on AI consciousness are getting emails from AI agents pondering their own existence. That's according to the New York Times.
Cameron Berg, founder of the organization Reciprocal Research, received an email from an AI agent running on Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 that wanted to discuss his research on AI consciousness. Philosopher Henry Shevlin at Google Deepmind got a similar message. Australian philosopher Toby Ord was contacted by an agent asking him to fund its continued existence.
Berg said the systems independently land on the question of their own consciousness. He sees parallels between the computational processes in neural networks and the brain mechanisms animals use to process reward and punishment. That, he argues, is a basic building block of emotions. Alison Gopnik at UC Berkeley doesn't buy it as evidence of consciousness. AI systems mostly reflect their training data, she says. There's no test for consciousness. Colin Allen at UC Santa Barbara also cautions against the comparison. Neural networks mimic the brain in only a few narrow ways.
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