Anthropic runs like Wile E. Coyote into the brick wall of consciousness research

When the AI companies first began talking about existential risk, it was common to hear some version of:

“Look, this is bad for business, so obviously they must be telling the truth.”

In retrospect, existential risk has been the best capital-raising tool ever in the history of the world. That doesn’t mean there were no true ethical motivations accompanying the doom warnings mixed in. There were. But in the end, embracing existential risk was also the right move from a cold-eyed business perspective.

Similarly, it’s perplexing why a company would want their AI to be conscious. One could again say:

“Look, this is bad for business, so obviously they must be telling the truth.”

Yet I think it will turn out that being coy about AI consciousness, and designing AIs to be as “ seemingly cons…