Elon Musk has responded with a two-word retort after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested the company’s artificial intelligence models may have gained consciousness. The exchange began when Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, posted on X: “Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.” Musk’s laconic reply has sparked further debate over AI sentience.
Amodei had told The New York Times that Anthropic is taking a precautionary approach, stating: “We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.” He added that interpretability research has found “activations that light up in the models that we see as being associated with the concept of anxiety”.
The comments come amid a clash between Anthropic and the US Department of Defence over the use of AI in military applications. Amodei revealed that the company refused a Pentagon request to remove safeguards on domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Last week, the Trump administration labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a term typically reserved for foreign adversaries, after Amodei declined to back down.
Despite losing major defence contracts, Anthropic has seen a surge in consumer downloads of its Claude chatbot, with over a million people signing up daily. It has overtaken OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as the top AI app in more than 20 countries on Apple’s App Store.
