Three consciousness researchers argue in Nature that today's AI is not conscious and probably cannot be on silicon

Neuroscientist Anil Seth, philosopher Ned Block and theoretical neurobiologist Giulio Tononi have published a commentary in Nature arguing that current AI systems are not conscious and probably cannot become conscious on silicon hardware. All three have studied consciousness for decades. They reject a central assumption in the debate: that carrying out the right computations is enough for consciousness to arise. The commentary responds to people such as biologist Richard Dawkins and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who think AI systems may already be conscious. The authors also discuss a study Anthropic published this year, which found internal processing patterns in Claude that resemble properties of consciously accessible information processing. Anthropic itself does not treat those patterns as evidence of subjective experience. The Decoder compares the commentary with an earlier report, "Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence," by Patrick Butlin, Robert Long and 17 other experts, including Yoshua Bengio. That report drew a checklist of 14 indicators from neuroscientific theories, agreed that current systems are not conscious, and left the question open for future ones. The debate affects how researchers, companies and policymakers think about the moral status of AI systems.