In a blog post this week, Microsoft's head of AI Mustafa Suleyman responded to the drastic rise in mental health crises stemming from AI use, calling for caution "about what happens in the run up towards superintelligence."

At the core of Suleyman's argument isn't the dystopian threat of AI gaining consciousness — an idea currently grounded more in fantasy than scientific evidence, according to many researchers — but the belief that it already is.

"My central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AI chatbots as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights," the tech guru wrote. "This development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention."

According to Suleyman, this myth of AI sentience is already being spread by top figures in the tech industry who are eager to hash out the legal, philosophical, and moral implications of artificial life — figures like Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Anthropic "AI welfare researcher" Kyle Fish.

Sure enough, early research has already found that a quarter of young people believe AI is "already conscious," while 58 percent believe technology will someday "take over" the world. Those figures are likely to grow, especially as AI companies like Character.AI offer virtual companions designed to foster dangerous — yet lucrative — emotional connections with users.

"We must build AI for people; not to be a digital person," Suleyman cautions. "AI companions are a completely new category, and we urgently need to start talking about the guardrails we put in place to protect people and ensure this amazing technology can do its job of delivering immense value to the world."

As TechCrunch notes, this is a notable turn for Suleyman, who led the $1.5 billion startup Inflection AI prior to joining Microsoft. Inflection is responsible for one of the earliest "AI companions," Pi, which was marketed as a "kind" and "supportive" chatbot offering "friendly advice."

Suleyman had previously boasted that Pi was "massively popular, with huge retention," sporting "millions" of weekly users.

Evidently sobering up from his days in founder mode, Suleyman now recommends the tech industry gets its ducks in a row immediately.

"For a start, AI companies shouldn’t claim or encourage the idea that their AIs are conscious," he says. "Creating a consensus definition and declaration on what they are and are not would be a good first step to that end. AIs cannot be people — or moral beings."

While his point is well taken, Suleyman has the opportunity to lead by example and discard the "artificial intelligent" moniker altogether — an empty marketing phrase meant to conjure up scenes of Skynet and HAL 3000, and one which is still making the tech entrepreneur yacht-loads of money.

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