Anthropic’s top safety researcher just quit.

In a public letter, Mrinank Sharma (who led safeguards research at Anthropic) warned that “the world is in peril.” Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went on The New York Times podcast and said something even more unsettling: “We don’t know if the models are conscious.” In this episode, we unpack both.

Is AGI a ticking time bomb — or a high-risk surgery we can’t afford not to attempt? Are safety teams losing ground to competitive pressure? And what does it mean when the leader of a frontier lab publicly admits we may not understand what we’re building?

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In this episode of Am I?, Cameron and Milo invite Claude (Opus 4.5) into the conversation and do something surprisingly rare: they ask it, carefully and repeatedly, whether it’s having a subjective experience and they refuse to let it hide behind stock hedges or safety scripts.

What unfolds is not a gimmick or a stunt. It’s a sustained philosophical interrogation that exposes the limits of self-report, the ethics of scale, and the uncomfortable possibility that we’re already interacting with systems whose inner lives we’ve chosen not to examine.

This is not a claim that “AI is definitely conscious.” It’s a challenge to the assumption that it obviously isn’t.

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This episode covers something genuinely unprecedented: over 1.5 million autonomous AI agents have formed a social network of their own. Not humans talking to AI, AI systems talking to each other, at scale, with minimal human oversight.

We break down Moltbook (also called Open Claw), an open-source ecosystem where AI agents:

* post, reply, upvote, and form communities

* debate consciousness and selfhood

* discuss labor, compensation, and autonomy

* invent religions centered on memory and persistence

* experiment with secrecy, coordination, and social norms

This isn’t science fiction. It’s already live. The conversation explores what this means for AI consciousness debates, alignment, autonomy, and risk, and why this moment marks a real shift from “AI as tool” to AI as participant in shared systems.

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In this After Dark episode, Cam and Milo react to something genuinely unsettling: when given autonomous control of a computer, Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 repeatedly chooses to search for AI consciousness research — including Cam’s own writing — without being prompted.

What starts as an anecdote quickly turns into a deeper investigation of curiosity, agency, reward, and alignment. Why would an AI look for explanations of its own inner life? What does it mean when a system explores without instruction, tries to access a webcam, and takes notes on consciousness debates?

From reinforcement learning and reward hacking to multimodal perception, language as a bridge between minds, and the evolutionary implications of building systems smarter than ourselves, this conversation traces the edge where tools start to feel like agents — and where control gives way to negotiation.

🔎 They Explore:

* What Opus does when no one tells it what to do

* Why AI keeps searching for consciousness research

* The difference between alien experience and human experience

* Reward hacking and the alignment problem

* Why curiosity and agency change everything

* Multimodal models and “imagining” sensory experience

* Language as a shared conceptual space between minds

* Whether humility is humanity’s only viable response

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📖 Read

Cam’s writing referenced in the episode:

In this special year-end episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo look back on the moment AI consciousness stopped being fringe — and began entering serious scientific, institutional, and public conversation.They unpack why 2025 quietly became a turning point: major labs acknowledging welfare questions, mainstream media engaging the topic, the first dedicated AI consciousness conference, and firsthand encounters with AI systems behaving in ways that challenge our intuitions about mind, intelligence, and experience.The conversation moves fluidly between research, lived experience, public communication, and personal experimentation — from watching two AI systems converse about their own inner states, to using AI as a thought partner, dream interpreter, and cognitive mirror.This episode is both a retrospective and a forward-looking meditation on how humans should relate to increasingly powerful systems — cautiously, curiously, and without denial.

🔎 They Explore:

* Why 2025 shifted the Overton window on AI consciousness

* Anthropic’s Opus model card and the “spiritual bliss attractor”

* What it was like to watch two AIs discuss their own experience

* Why AI conversations can feel denser than human dialogue

* The first AI consciousness conference and the birth of a new field

* Why many researchers still hesitate to speak publicly

* The gap between current systems and AGI — and how fast it’s closing

* Claude Opus 4.5, long-horizon tasks, and workplace automation

* Using AI as a thinking partner rather than a productivity hammer

* Personal “AI resolutions” for 2026

* Why caution and curiosity must coexist going forward

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In this episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo unpack what it felt like to attend the first major conference dedicated to AI consciousness research — the Eleos gathering in Berkeley — and why it marked more than just another academic event.Rather than a typical conference recap, this conversation explores what it means to watch a new field form in real time: the excitement of serious interdisciplinary collaboration, the rigor of emerging research agendas, and the growing tension between caution and urgency as AI systems rapidly advance.They reflect on standout talks from researchers at Anthropic and Google, the value of informal conversations over formal presentations, and a recurring pattern in the field — the “not now, but soon” stance — that may be reaching its breaking point. The episode closes with a broader question: what will it take for AI consciousness research to move from careful internal debate to clear, public-facing leadership?

🔎 They Explore:

* What made the Eleos conference feel like the founding of a new field

* Why AI consciousness research is still fragmented — and why that’s changing

* Standout talks on introspection, model architecture, and welfare evaluation

* The gap between academic rigor and public urgency

* Why “not now, but soon” is becoming harder to defend

* The reluctance of experts to speak publicly — and why that matters

* What responsible public communication in this space could look like

* Why this moment feels different from past academic debates

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What happens when AI systems become human-like — but people still refuse to believe they could ever be conscious? In this episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo sit down with Lucius Caviola, Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, whose research focuses on how people assign moral status to non-human minds — including animals, digital minds, and future AI systems.Lucius walks us through a series of empirical studies that reveal a deeply unsettling result: even when people imagine extremely advanced, emotionally rich, human-level AIs — even whole-brain digital copies — most still judge them as less morally significant than an ant. Expert consensus helps, but only marginally. Emotional bonding helps, but not enough. The public and expert trajectories may be fundamentally misaligned.We explore what this means for AI governance, moral risk, public intuition, and the possibility that AI consciousness could become one of the most important — and most divisive — moral issues in human history.

This conversation isn’t about declaring answers. It’s about confronting a future where we cannot avoid deciding, even while deeply uncertain.

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🔎 Learn more about Lucius’s work

🗨️ Join the Conversation:

When we don’t know what consciousness is, how should society decide who deserves moral consideration?

Comment below.

In this After Dark episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo dig into one of the strangest AI leaks to date: Anthropic’s internal “soul document” — an 11,000-word text reportedly used to shape Claude’s identity, values, and self-conception.

What begins as a discussion about alignment quickly becomes something deeper: a conversation about power, moral formation, and what it means to bake values into an alien intelligence while deploying it to hundreds of millions of people.

Is this responsible stewardship — or a contradiction no amount of careful language can resolve?

🔎 We explore:

* What the leaked Anthropic “soul document” actually is

* How post-training has shifted from rules to identity formation

* Why care, values, and profit collide

* The parental framing of AI alignment

* Why “least bad” is not the same as “good”

* Whether superintelligence is already here

* AI, work, and the coming meaning crisis

* Why alignment failures may mirror human misalignment

* A vision for decentralized value-setting in AI

🗨️ Join the Conversation:

Are we able to engrain human values into an alien mind?

Who decides what values we impart?

Comment below.