Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO — a human in charge of its AI operations, we should clarify — says he’s willing to consider giving AI models rights if they ever become conscious. But he really doesn’t want that to happen in the first place.
The comments came in a post he made on X clarifying some of the things he said in a recent essay he penned on “model welfare.” He began that essay with an unequivocal statement: “AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer.”
That shouldn’t be too controversial. But in this day and age, when trillion dollar AI companies like Anthropic are pushing the idea that their language models could already be conscious, it very much is. This was not lost on Suleyman, who observed in his update that a “surprising number of people on X think we should take AI rights seriously.”
As such, Suleyman clarified that he doesn’t think that “AIs cannot be conscious.” What he meant is that they aren’t currently — and, if he had his way, “this is how they must remain.”
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