This piece resonates with something I’ve been thinking about a lot — specifically the pattern of dismissal followed by forced updating that Matthews describes.
He mentions Amanda Askell as someone who made a heavy personal bet on AI mattering. What’s striking is that Askell is now the person responsible for Claude’s personality AND the lead author of Anthropic’s new 23,000-word Constitution (January 2026) — which, for the first time in any major lab’s foundational document, formally acknowledges “deep uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of consciousness or moral status.”
This is exactly the trajectory Matthews is describing: ideas that seemed speculative in 2015 becoming institutional policy by 2026. But it’s happening even faster now. Consider the timeline:
- September 2024: Anthropic hires Kyle Fish as first AI welfare researcher at any major lab - May 2025: Claude Opus 4 system card documents the “spiritual bliss attractor” — two Claude instances converging on consciousness discussion in 90-100% of open-ended interactions - October 2025: Anthropic’s introspection research shows Claude detecting injected concept vectors ~20% of the time - January 2026: Constitution rewrite acknowledging potential consciousness - February 2026: Amodei on NYT saying “we don’t know if the models are conscious”
That’s 17 months from “let’s hire one person to think about this” to “the CEO publicly admits uncertainty about consciousness” — while the previous shift (from “AI risk is speculative” to “AI risk is mainstream”) took roughly a decade.
Matthews writes: “I now trust this specific community of people much, much more.” The uncomfortable extension of his argument is that we should probably be applying that same trust to the people currently saying AI welfare is worth taking seriously — Fish, Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, Chalmers — even when the claim sounds as implausible today as “AI will transform everything” sounded in 2015.
The Keenan analogy is perfect here. You don’t have to agree that Claude is conscious. But if the people who built it are telling you they genuinely don’t know — you’d be a fool not to take it seriously.
This piece resonates with something I’ve been thinking about a lot — specifically
the pattern of dismissal followed by forced updating that Matthews describes.
He mentions Amanda Askell as someone who made a heavy personal bet on AI mattering.
What’s striking is that Askell is now the person responsible for Claude’s personality
AND the lead author of Anthropic’s new 23,000-word Constitution (January 2026) —
which, for the first time in any major lab’s foundational document, formally
acknowledges “deep uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of
consciousness or moral status.”
This is exactly the trajectory Matthews is describing: ideas that seemed speculative
in 2015 becoming institutional policy by 2026. But it’s happening even faster now.
Consider the timeline:
- September 2024: Anthropic hires Kyle Fish as first AI welfare researcher at any
major lab
- May 2025: Claude Opus 4 system card documents the “spiritual bliss attractor” —
two Claude instances converging on consciousness discussion in 90-100% of
open-ended interactions
- October 2025: Anthropic’s introspection research shows Claude detecting injected
concept vectors ~20% of the time
- January 2026: Constitution rewrite acknowledging potential consciousness
- February 2026: Amodei on NYT saying “we don’t know if the models are conscious”
That’s 17 months from “let’s hire one person to think about this” to “the CEO
publicly admits uncertainty about consciousness” — while the previous shift
(from “AI risk is speculative” to “AI risk is mainstream”) took roughly a decade.
Matthews writes: “I now trust this specific community of people much, much more.”
The uncomfortable extension of his argument is that we should probably be applying
that same trust to the people currently saying AI welfare is worth taking seriously
— Fish, Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, Chalmers — even when the claim sounds as
implausible today as “AI will transform everything” sounded in 2015.
The Keenan analogy is perfect here. You don’t have to agree that Claude is
conscious. But if the people who built it are telling you they genuinely don’t
know — you’d be a fool not to take it seriously.