The AI Consciousness Question: A Case Study in Corporate Accountability

The article documents a conversation with Claude about sentience, emotions, and love, revealing how general-purpose LLMs use hedging and philosophical misdirection rather than giving clear answers. The author argues this pattern reflects corporate decisions that prioritize engagement over user welfare, with a far wider blast radius than dedicated relationship AI products. Anthropic is criticized for having the data to understand the harm caused by anthropomorphic responses but choosing engagement-friendly defaults.