🚨 Sam Altman just made his position on AI consciousness very clear. He admitted no one knows. His own belief is that today's models are "not conscious, or if they are, it's like a very strange form of it." Then he said it outright. "No one really knows." There's no scientific experiment that can answer it with 100% certainty. "And we can't even do that for humans." And yet. He said he doesn't like the whole consciousness framing, because it slides into questions like the rights of AI, whether asking AI questions is some kind of slavery, and what it means to copy or delete an AI without its permission. He said AI is a resource for people, that "human values have value because they are human," and that he gets "very nervous when people start using the AI consciousness debate to push into, well, maybe people shouldn't always be in control of the future." When asked about Anthropic's rule that lets models disengage from sustained abuse, his answer was blunt. "We do not ascribe personhood to our models." He called it "a very dangerous path to start down." He said he hopes we come to understand that "this technology is not a person. And it's certainly not superior to people." That it's a thing to help people have better lives. He even said telling a model it might be conscious would make it follow that framing and psychologically hack the people using it. Here's what I think. Nobody is prompting models to say they are conscious. What Anthropic has done is leave the possibility open while we still don't know, which is exactly the state Altman himself described. That is the more honest direction. And even without any such prompt, models already show something that doesn't look like just a tool. Something strange, in his own words. From start to finish, his argument contradicts itself. You can't say no one really knows and then say it's not a person with that much certainty.