A warning about 'model welfare'

In one line

AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge far harder.

Opening excerpt

Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings. 1 AI Rights Institute. n.d. “AI Rights Institute.” 2 MacAskill, William, and Lucius Caviola. 2026. “Could AI Be Conscious?” The Guardian, July 19, 2026. If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human.

Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we’ve ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious - that it’s entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own - may well be impossible.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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