The question of AI consciousness has escaped containment from academic circles and labs and entered into our living rooms. In August 2025, Anthropic gave some versions of Claude the ability to end user conversations if a conversation was judged to be abusive or harmful and if repeated attempts to redirect it did not succeed. The end user in these instances would then see a notification saying that, “Claude has ended this chat.” This feature was framed by the company as primarily an experiment in “AI welfare.” The idea of taking precautions to ensure the welfare of AI systems raises a question which we don’t currently know how to answer – could anything be good or bad for an AI in the sense that we think that pain is bad for a dog or that relief is good for a person? Is there currently, or even one day potentially – the capacity for subjective experience in these systems?
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