What Would a Conscious AI Mean? (opens in new tab)

What Would a Conscious AI Mean? Anthropic's CEO can't rule it out. Lawyers are drafting frameworks. I've been thinking about and debating this for 40 years. We are closer to machine consciousness with each passing model, but no closer to answering what that means or how to handle it societally. On a February 2026 episode of the New York Times "Interesting Times" podcast, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said something most tech executives have carefully avoided: "We don't know if the models are con...