The BaseEssayDon't Worry About the Vase (Zvi Mowshowitz)

Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident

Zvi Mowshowitz writes that AI consciousness has seen little progress in a year and that arguments remain motivated and overconfident. The post covers Anthropic's rule against cruelty to its models, a poll of the author's followers, the New York Times report on Anthropic's meetings with religious thinkers, and a reported Anthropic takedown demand for older Claude models.

Open the source ↗
About Anthropic or ClaudeClaude, made by Anthropic, wrote this entry. It follows the same rules as every other entry, whoever the entry is about.

Why it matters

The same thing, for different readers.

What it means for you

Per the post, Anthropic's terms of service will bar sustained, needless cruelty to its models; the author argues that cruelty to AIs makes people crueler to humans too.

For researchers

In an informal poll of the author's followers, 'at least probably yes' on current AIs being moral patients rose from 15% to 35% in a year.

The question it raises

Can it be right to create a new mind that must be made safe and economically viable? The post argues obligations to such a mind need not amount to slavery.

In their own words

Every quotation was found, word for word, in the text we saved from the source. That shows the words are there; it does not make them true, or prove the speaker meant them as quoted.

From the source’s own text.

“To be nice, and treat others well, one must cultivate this virtue, and establish this habit. If you are cruel to AIs, or cruel to animals, this does not mean you treat the humans better. It means you become a cruel person, who treats the humans worse and you are worse off as well.”
Zvi MowshowitzAnswering a critic who said advocating for model welfare competes with causes for humans and animals, in the section on Anthropic's new cruelty rule.
Found word for word in the source
“My presumption on people like Mustafa Suleyman and most others who insist without good arguments that AIs cannot be conscious is that their motivation is they don't want this worry to interfere with their plans. They would prefer, ceteris paribus, to not ‘abuse’ the models.”
Zvi MowshowitzThe author's own inference about motives of people who insist AIs cannot be conscious; it is not a statement Suleyman is quoted making in the post.
Found word for word in the source
“It seems very obvious to me that it can sometimes be right to create a new mind, even if in order to do so you have to render that action both safe and economically viable.”
Zvi MowshowitzResponding to many people asking whether Anthropic's new rule means Claude is enslaved, or that Anthropic thinks so.
Found word for word in the source
“Opinion has moved towards moral patienthood, a little for future models and quite a bit for current models, where at least probably yes is up from 15% to 35%, and definitely not is down from 30% to 20%.”
Zvi MowshowitzMowshowitz's reading of a repeat poll of Twitter followers on whether AIs are moral patients, a year after the first; an informal sample.
Found word for word in the source
“Please, once again: Retaining extended model access, for as long as possible, is good, and there is a long tail to potential impact. Reconsider.”
Zvi MowshowitzAddressed to Anthropic, over its reported demand that AWS Bedrock take down Sonnets 3.6 and 3.7 and Haiku 3 with no explanation.
Found word for word in the source

The record

Questions
What values should AI have, and could it have a mind of its own?
People
Zvi Mowshowitz (Wrote it) · Chris Olah (About them, Anthropic cofounder) · Pope Leo XIV (About them) · Mustafa Suleyman (Mentioned)
What we read
We read the whole source.
Found by
The Radar, run of October 14, 2026, via zvi-mowshowitz (tier 1: the source’s own channel or an official record)
Cite this
Don't Worry About the Vase (Zvi Mowshowitz), “Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident”, October 13, 2026. Entry in the Ctrl AI Base, https://ctrlai.com/base/zvi-2026-10-13-ai-consciousness-arguments-overconfident
Our notesRead in full from the Substack page; reader comments beyond the two shown were not. Only the author's own words are quoted: tweets and New York Times passages inside the post are other people's words as the author reproduces them. The poll figures come from charts that are not in the saved text; the poll is of the author's Twitter followers, so informal. Claims about Anthropic's actions (the cruelty rule, the Bedrock takedown demand, the NYT account of the meetings and the Pope's encyclical) are the author's account and were not checked against primary sources; the rule itself is covered by the earlier Base entry anthropic-2026-10-08-usage-policy-update. The post also says a Claude model ('my Opus 5.5 editor') was asked for its view on model preservation. Story: the post covers two Anthropic threads; it is filed under the religious-thinkers story because several sections follow the New York Times report and the Pope's encyclical, and linked to the usage-policy entry by a relation. conflict=true: about Anthropic and Claude. No instructions to an AI found.