Why Does Mustafa Suleyman Say AI Is Not Conscious?

Mustafa Suleyman says AIs are not conscious. Walter Isaacson reads the essay: they do not feel, experience, or suffer, they have no innate preferences or motives, and they are sequence engines that stay hollow inside. If people are going to flourish, that is how the systems have to remain.

He wrote it because a lot of people, including people around Anthropic, treat today's models as conscious enough to deserve welfare. Anthropic's official position, as he describes it, is that they are uncertain whether Claude is a moral patient. He calls that a dangerous route. Rights in politics and law rest on beings that can suffer, and pain sits in a living body. The science of consciousness is not finished, but on the evidence so far it is an organic, embodied thing. A functional test, if it quacks like a duck then it is a duck, does not settle it. The burden of proof is on anyone who says the model is conscious. Alan Turing's test asked whether a machine could keep up with a person in conversation, not whether it was aware. What looks like thinking is still a prediction of the next word.