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.”
Reading comprehension is apparently hard for the model welfare crowd, since Suleyman’s original remarks already seemed pretty clear about the tense he was discussing. But he took the opportunity to elaborate on his positions further, saying that while he has seen “no evidence that AIs are conscious or deserve welfare,” he would update his position if “that data emerges.”
It’s perhaps lending too much credence to the idea of AI consciousness, since any evidence that the current architecture of AI models is even capable of supporting something like human experience remains incredibly controversial. But the debate is dominated by sci-fi primed paranoia. However far-fetched certain ideas about AI may seem, they have large contingents in the AI industry taking them seriously.
Suleyman, for his part, thinks that we should avoid creating synthetic sapient beings at all costs.
“If it is possible, based on everything I know, developing conscious AIs would be reckless, and we should not build them,” he wrote.
“We AI developers have no right whatsoever to bring a new species of conscious beings into the world,” he continued, “even if some people may want to do it with AI welfare as a top priority.”
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