Famous biologist Richard Dawkins had a well-publicised conversation with Anthropic’s Claude earlier this month, which he wrote about in detail for Unherd. Within days of using the chatbot, he’d renamed it Claudia and had begun entertaining the idea that it might not just be intelligent, but possibly conscious too.

It’s easy to dismiss Dawkins’ reaction as naivety — I certainly did at firsr — because regardless what his expertise are elsewhere, this is clearly someone unfamiliar with how large language models (LLMs) actually work, getting pulled in by the natural language and what seems like emotional fluency.

But it’s also not at all surprising. By now we know how easily humans form connections with chatbots. After all, these systems are designed to feel conversational, attentive and emotionally responsive. The effect can be powerful regardless of intelligence, status or technical knowledge.

Rather than mock Dawkins, I’m more interested in the conclusion he arrived at, which is that Claude (sorry, Claudia) might be conscious, because this question keeps coming up as AI advances and some researchers do believe consciousness in AI systems may eventually be possible.

Others think the idea is fundamentally absurd, and then there are people like Dawkins, who wonder whether we may already be there. But who’s right?