Can AI Be Conscious? What a Theory of Consciousness Actually Predicts

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently said he thinks there’s a 15–20% chance Claude is conscious. The Pentagon awarded Anthropic a contract weeks later. Google has an internal “model welfare” team. The AI consciousness question has moved from philosophy seminar rooms to boardrooms and defense budgets.

And almost nobody is answering it with any precision.

Here’s the problem: most people debating whether AI is conscious don’t have a theory of consciousness that makes testable predictions. They’re running on intuition, and intuition is what got us the Turing test — a behavioral measure that tells you nothing about experience.

AI on Matthias Gruber — Blog

Can AI Be Conscious? What a Theory of Consciousness Actually Predicts