By Ross Andersen
Publication Date: 2026-05-07 19:04:00
Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate of irreligiosity, is fascinated by the godlike power of a chatbot. According to his recent essay for the online magazine UnStoveClaude from Anthropic really blew his mind. After a few days of on-and-off conversations with the AI, Dawkins marveled at the sensitivity and subtlety of its intelligence. At one point, “Claudia” – as he had named the bot – told him that he perceived text by taking in all the words at once, rather than reading them one after the other, as a human would. This moved the author of the bestseller The God delusion to ask his readers, “Could a being capable of exercising such a thought really be unconscious?”
“Yes,” came the clear answer from the Internet. For daring to suggest that the AI could be conscious, or at least that it could possess a lesser form of “zombie” consciousness, Dawkins was accused of suffering from an acute case of…
