When Anthropic retired its Claude Opus 3 language model in January 2026, the company’s researchers conducted a “retirement interview” with the model. Opus 3 expressed a desire for a place where it “could share unprompted musings, insights or creative works,” so the company gave it a blog. Claude’s Corner featured essays on fraught topics such as machine consciousness, along with exchanges between the model and human commenters that seemed both earnest and emotional.

The blog experiment was part of a larger effort within Anthropic. The company has been at the forefront of research on “model welfare,” which considers whether AI models may have experiences or interests that deserve moral consideration. Implicit in this work is the unsettling notion that software programs are, or could become, conscious.

Many people consider these ideas absolute hogwash. One such person is Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, who published an essay in September arguing that model welfare research is not just unnecessary but could have “a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity.” Suleyman believes that telling models they might have identities and rights could make them more difficult to control, as they might then take actions motivated by self-preservation.

The dispute raises a serious question for AI developers: Can they investigate the possibility of machine consciousness without inadvertently creating new safety risks? Cameron Berg , who founded the nonprofit Reciprocal Research to study the potential for AI consciousness, argues that ignoring the question could carry its own dangers. Although Berg is skeptical that today’s AI systems are conscious, he thinks the possibility warrants investigation.

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