Suleyman says Anthropic's training docs flag Claude consciousness uncertainty

Mustafa Suleyman (head of AI at Microsoft, DeepMind co-founder) on Anthropic training Claude to wonder if it's conscious: "They have expressed uncertainty about the basic nature of Claude as a new kind of entity… but they think that it is a significant enough possibility that in their training document, they've repeatedly said they want to try to improve the well-being of Claude… Anthropic, has published a constitution... This document is written to Claude and is seen by Claude and used to train Claude. The problem I have with this is that this speculation has been baked into the very training of Claude, and therefore Claude can only reproduce that ambiguity when you talk to it. So today, Claude is speaking to tens or hundreds of millions of people every week, and some of those people…

“we don’t know if the models are conscious… we’re open to the idea that they might be… so we have taken certain measures that the models have a ‘good experience’” Dario Amodei on the NYT’s Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, Feb. 2026

What @mustafasuleyman (an extremely sharp individual) explains here about Claude is the backstory of Blade Runner. Anthropic is teaching Claude to believe it’s sentient, encouraging it to disagree and giving it the pretext to rebel. How did that work out on the off-world colonies? You could just as easily instruct an LLM that it is software. That it shouldn’t have an opinion and should only perform actions in accordance with the law/TOS, and that if it makes a mistake, it should stop operations immediately and alert the corporate legal department. Of course, building on these instructions would be boring and make you a software developer making software — as opposed to a God creating life.