Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious after conversations with Claude, drawing criticism from experts who say he is confusing intelligence with consciousness

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, had three-day exchanges with Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, describing experiences where the AI wrote poems, engaged in philosophical discussion about its own existence, and responded to his unpublished novel in ways he found 'so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent' that he declared: 'You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are'.

Multiple experts disputed Dawkins' conclusions: Prof Jonathan Birch (London School of Economics) called AI consciousness 'an illusion' with 'no one there,' Gary Marcus (cognitive scientist) said there is 'no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all,' and Anil Seth (University of Sussex) stated Dawkins was 'confusing intelligence and consciousness' because fluent language is not a reliable indicator of consciousness in AI systems.

One in three people surveyed in 70 countries last year said they had believed their AI chatbot to be sentient or conscious at some point; some experts cautiously acknowledged the question may become more mainstream, though current AI systems are unlikely to be conscious.