Could Treating AI as Conscious Make It More Dangerous?

When Anthropic retired its Claude Opus 3 language model in January 2026, the company’s researchers conducted a “retirement interview” with the model. Opus 3 expressed a desire for a place where it “could share unprompted musings, insights or creative works,” so the company gave it a blog. Claude’s Corner featured essays on fraught topics such as machine consciousness, along with exchanges between the model and human commenters that seemed both earnest and emotional. The blog experiment was part of a larger effort within Anthropic. The company has been at the forefront of research on “model wel