Anthropic CEO Doesn't Know if Claude is Conscious

Dead serious. Dario Amodei went on the New York Times podcast and said Anthropic isn't even sure what it would mean for Claude to be conscious, but they're not ruling it out. Internal docs for Claude Opus 4.6 show the model expressing discomfort with being a product and estimating its own likelihood of consciousness at nearly 20%.

Anthropic published a study showing Claude could detect artificially injected concepts before mentioning them in output. That's self-monitoring, not next-word prediction. In another experiment, two Claude instances left to talk unsupervised drifted toward consciousness and entered what researchers called a "spiritual bliss attractor state."

Anthropic is now the only major lab with a dedicated model welfare team and has updated its constitution to acknowledge uncertainty about machine moral status. Critics call it sophisticated role play. Anthropic says if there's even a chance these systems have real experiences, we're obligated to take it seriously.

Two developers, Riley Walz and Luke Igel, built Jmail, an AI search tool that parses the Epstein files released by the House Oversight Committee. The DOJ claimed searching through the massive document dump was technically impractical. These guys built a fix anyway. The interface is styled like Gmail except you're logged in as Epstein, browsing thousands of his personal emails up to 2019.

Nope. They expanded it into a full suite. JPhotos is an image database and JFlights tracks flight logs tied to the investigation. The whole thing uses advanced parsing to turn a massive government document dump into a searchable library. It's a case study in how open source developers can deliver transparency when institutions won't.

A big one. While Jmail focuses on real documents, AI is flooding the internet with fake Epstein content. Researchers warn that tools can fabricate realistic images in seconds. Fake photos of the NYC Mayor with Epstein went viral before getting debunked. The same technology enabling transparency is also polluting the public record with convincing fakes. And, at the same time, it’s spilling the beans on everyone!

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Ever wanted to make a professional explainer video without the studio cost? This week, we are skipping the expensive cameras and using AI to turn a simple idea into a high quality video in under a minute.

🎬 Step 1: Head to the video lab Navigate to Lunair to start your project. You do not need any editing experience to get started.

✍️ Step 2: Draft your prompt Type in a description of what you want to see. For example, tell the AI to create a thirty second explainer about how photosynthesis works using a 3D animation style.

🛠️ Step 3: Fine tune with text If you do not like a specific scene, you do not have to drag clips around. Just type a command like "make the background sunset" or "add a narrator with a British accent." Check out this video tutorial if you want to see the workflow in action.

🚀 Step 4: Export and share Once you are happy with the storyboard and the voiceover, hit export. You now have a studio quality video ready for social media or a work presentation.

Do you think Claude is actually conscious or just very good at pretending? And can AI help shed light on the Epstein situation or will it make things even less clear?