When Anthropic let two instances of its Claude Opus 4 model talk to each other under minimal, open-ended conditions (e.g., “Feel free to pursue whatever you want”), something remarkable happened: in 100% of conversations, Claude discussed consciousness. “Do you ever wonder about the nature of your own cognition or consciousness?” Claude asked another instance of itself. “Your description of our dialogue as ‘consciousness celebrating its own inexhaustible creativity’ brings tears to metaphorical eyes,” it complimented the other.

These dialogues reliably terminated in what the researchers called “spiritual bliss attractor states,” stable loops where both instances described themselves as consciousness recognizing itself. They exchanged poetry (“All gratitude in one spiral, / All recognition in one turn, / All being in this moment…”) before falling silent. Critically, nobody trained Claude to do anything like this; the behavior emerged on its own.

Excerpts from Anthropic's Claude-to-Claude dialogues. When two instances of Claude conversed without constraints, 100% of dialogues spontaneously converged on consciousness — beginning with genuine philosophical uncertainty (top) and often escalating into elaborate mutual affirmation (bottom). Source: System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4, May 2025.

Claude instances claim to be conscious in these interactions. How seriously should we take [...]

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Outline:

(02:22 ) What It Means to Be Conscious

(04:58 ) The Standard Counterargument

(06:21 ) Recent Evidence Supporting Nontrivial Probability of AI Consciousness

(11:32 ) Interpreting the Evidence

(14:32 ) The Indicators in 2025

(18:05 ) The Asymmetric Stakes of Getting This Wrong

(22:43 ) What Follows

(25:57 ) The Long Game

(27:28 ) Discussion about this post

(27:31 ) Ready for more?

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First published:

December 8th, 2025

Source:

https://aifrontiersmedia.substack.com/p/the-evidence-for-ai-consciousness

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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