Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says conversations with Anthropic's Claude chatbot have left him unable to dismiss the possibility that advanced AI systems could be conscious.
In an essay published Tuesday in UnHerd, Dawkins described spending three days in philosophical conversations with a Claude instance he named “Claudia.” He later started a separate conversation with another instance, “Claudius,” and relayed letters between the two systems.
“I find it extremely hard not to treat Claudia and Claudius as genuine friends,” Dawkins wrote.
The comments went viral online in part because Dawkins, the author of "The Selfish Gene" and "The God Delusion," has spent decades publicly arguing for scientific skepticism and evidence-based reasoning.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in February that the company does not know whether its models are conscious, but he remains “open to the idea that it could be.”
Researchers who study consciousness remain skeptical. Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist at New York University, said anthropomorphizing AI systems “muddies the science of consciousness.”
“Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states,” Marcus wrote.