By Megan Frances Moss
Publication Date: 2026-05-07 01:43:00
In recent days, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a commentary suggesting that the AI chatbot Claude could be conscious.
Dawkins expressed no certainty that Claude was conscious. However, he pointed out that Claude’s highly developed abilities were difficult to understand without attributing some sort of inner experience to the machine. The illusion of consciousness – if it is an illusion – is incredibly convincing:
If I suspect she may be unconscious, I don’t tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!
Dawkins is not the first to suspect a conscious chatbot. In 2022, Blake Lemoine – an engineer at Google – claimed that Google’s chatbot LaMDA had interests and could only be used with the tool’s own consent.
The history of such claims dates back to the world’s first chatbot in the mid-1960s. It was called Eliza and followed simple rules that allowed it to survey users about their experiences and beliefs.
Many users have been…
