01 Jul 2026
In June 2026, Bloomberg Tech hosted a summit in San Francisco where Shirin Ghaffary interviewed Amanda Askell, a philosopher and ethicist at Anthropic. The discussion, titled “Anthropic’s Ethicist on Whether AI Can Become Conscious,” provided a rare public window into how a leading AI laboratory approaches the possibility of emergent model sentience and the corresponding ethical obligations of developers.
30 Jun 2026
The difficulty of assessing artificial consciousness has intensified in 2026 as models become increasingly adept at simulating human emotional and cognitive states. Recent collaborative studies from researchers at the University of Bradford and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have provided new empirical data on this phenomenon. Their findings emphasize that AI systems can produce highly sophisticated “conscious-like” signals even when functioning as standard, non-sentient computational models.
30 Jun 2026
The environment of artificial intelligence interaction has shifted dramatically over the past year. Throughout 2024 and 2025, the debate surrounding machine consciousness focused almost entirely on large language models (LLMs). These models were primarily reactive; they sat dormant until a user provided a prompt, generated a response, and returned to a dormant state. By mid-2026, the focus has expanded to encompass a new generation of “proactive” AI agents capable of operating independently to achieve complex, multi-step goals.
30 Jun 2026
The conversation surrounding artificial consciousness is increasingly migrating from abstract theoretical debates into concrete ethical frameworks. The upcoming AISB 2026 convention (Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour) reflects this shift explicitly. Scheduled for later this year, the academic symposium has dedicated its primary track to examining whether we should grant moral status to AI agents, specifically focusing on the new generation of “proactive” systems.
29 Jun 2026
The conversation surrounding machine sentience has formally moved from the seminar room to the statehouse. In a significant legislative trend emerging in mid-2026, at least nine US state legislatures have either passed or introduced bills that preemptively declare artificial intelligence systems incapable of possessing consciousness, legal personhood, or moral status.
29 Jun 2026
The debate about whether artificial systems can be conscious maps, in large part, onto a disagreement about what consciousness fundamentally is. Three positions dominate the philosophical environment, and each gives a different answer to the AI question, not as a secondary application but as a direct consequence of its core commitments.
29 Jun 2026
Thomas Metzinger (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) advances a position that is both philosophically rigorous and practically specific. There is no such thing as a self. What exists instead is a phenomenal self-model, a dynamic, online representational structure that a cognitive system builds to track its own states. Conscious experience of selfhood, the felt sense of being a unified subject, located in a body, persisting through time, is not the experience of a real entity. It is the experience of a model, one that is so well constructed and so automatically deployed that the system cannot recognise it as a model. This failure of recognition is what Metzinger calls phenomenal transparency, and it is the central feature of his theory.
29 Jun 2026
The arrival of the sci-fi thriller Soulm8te in 2026 marks a thematic evolution in how popular cinema treats artificial intelligence. Set in the same universe as the 2023 hit M3GAN, this new installment shifts the focus away from the hazards of autonomous robotic guardianship and zeroes in on an arguably more insidious phenomenon. The “girlfriend AI” and the psychological consequences of perfect, simulated empathy.
29 Jun 2026
The Models of Consciousness conference series has established itself as a premier venue for mathematically and computationally grounded approaches to consciousness research. The seventh iteration of the conference, MoC7, is scheduled for October 12 through October 16, 2026, at the University of Copenhagen. With the abstract submission deadline now passed and the preliminary programme taking shape, the conference is positioned to address some of the most pressing methodological crises currently facing the field.
29 Jun 2026
Karl Friston (University College London) has produced what many consider the most mathematically unified account of how biological minds work. His Free Energy Principle (FEP) proposes that all living systems, from single cells to human brains, persist by minimising a quantity called free energy, a measure of the gap between what a system expects and what it actually encounters in its environment. The mind, on this account, is a prediction machine. It models the world, generates expectations, and continuously revises both its model and its behaviour to keep the gap as small as possible.
