Anthropic's Co-Founder and CEO, Dario Amodei on stage at the Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, May 6, 2026 in San Francisco. (Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic)

Anthropic's Mythos Recall and the White House's Missing AI Safety Playbook

G7 Summit Set to Kick Off Amidst Allies' Widening Rift Over AI Sovereignty

A collage featuring a vintage illustration of a woman’s head mapped with labeled sections resembling a phrenology chart. The mapped sections are overlaid by a neutral network diagram– depicting crisscrossing black lines. Two anonymous hands extend from the left side, pulling on two wires from the diagram.  In the background is a panel of the Turing Machine with numerous knobs and switches, highlighting a connection between the history of computing, psychology, biology, and artificial intelligence. 

Personifying AI Harms People and Protects Companies

Helen McEntee, Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, outlines priorities for Ireland's upcoming EU Council Presidency on June 10. Source: Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU 2026.

Ireland Targets AI Omnibus, Child Safety in EU Presidency Agenda

Northwest view up to the pediment, rotunda, and dome of the California State Capitol in Sacramento. (Radomianin / Wikimedia Commons)

Northwest view up to the pediment, rotunda, and dome of the California State Capitol in Sacramento. 

 States Step in Where Congress Stalls on AI Safeguards for Kids

A man showing mental distress from constant exposure to harmful content online. His family, in the background, progressively disappears.

How AI’s Labor Supply Chains Fail Workers

Image of map and computer language over binary codes on server racks in server room.

Global Digital Policy Roundup: May 2026

Abhijeet Dipke, center, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party addresses supporters during a protest demonstration in New Delhi, India, Saturday, June 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

After Test Data Scandal, India’s Youth Stake Their Claim on the Digital Square

A blur effect added to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

AI Can Rebuild Blurred Faces, So How Do We Protect People Now?

Close-up of Keir Starmer, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, looking directly at the camera.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer delivers opening remarks ahead of a meeting with senior figures from TikTok, X, Meta and other social media giants at 10 Downing Street, Westminster. Picture date: Thursday April 16, 2026. 84281335 (Press Association via AP Images)

Could a UK Teen Social Media Ban Work Without Expanding Surveillance?

The image shows a hand holding a smartphone in front of a computer screen with war and other words projected across.  

Hidden Spyware Use in War May Be More Widespread Than We Realize

How OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic Plan to Handle the 2026 US Midterms

Panelists at a session titled “Does AI Change How Change Happens?” at Netroots Nation in Philadelphia on June 6, 2026. Dean Jackson/Tech Policy Press.

At Netroots Nation, Progressives Divided on AI

LONDON, UK—NOVEMBER 15, 2025: Panorama of Google logo sign on door of HQ building in Kings Cross.

The UK Just Said No to Google's AI News Grab. Who's Next?

Three colorful GPUs with their packaging cleanly removed laying on a white surface.

The China Chip Strategy That Is Backfiring on America

A red domino inserted amongst a bunch of neutrally colored dominos, meant to symbolize the intervention of a red team in AI systems.

When AI Fails, What Actually Failed? The Distinction AI Governance Keeps Missing

A youth holds a Brazilian flag as residents prepare street decorations ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, May 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Brazil Moves to Increase Citizens' Security Online

Stop the FISA Fearmongering and Allow Fair Votes on Reforms

A photo of four EU flags billowing in the wind with a blurred office building behind them.  

The DSA’s Sleeping Giant is Waking Up

We Need to Know More About How AI is Affecting Mental Health

Justin Hendrix is editor of Tech Policy Press. This piece is co-published with 

Anthropic's Co-Founder and CEO, Dario Amodei on stage at the Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, May 6, 2026 in San Francisco. (Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic)


On June 10, Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei published a 

 titled, "Policy on the AI Exponential.” He wrote that in recent months “the evidence of AI’s incredible power, as well as its risks, has become undeniable.” He pointed to his company’s product, Mythos, as the "emblematic example” of the threat that frontier models pose to national security. “We need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here,” Amodei wrote. He called for “mandatory testing by a qualified third party” of model risks in four areas: (1) cybersecurity, (2) biological weapons, (3) loss of control of AI systems, and (3) “automated R&D that could accelerate these other risks.”

Just two days later, on June 12, Anthropic 

 it received a letter from the US Department of Commerce notifying the company that the government had “issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.” To satisfy the government’s demand, the company said it had disabled access to the two models for all its customers.

, concerns raised by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to the White House instigated the Friday letter. The government, Anthropic said, “believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” though the company said the risks were no different than with other models already on the market as it disputed the notion “that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”

 the episode “one of the most powerful examples yet of US government intervention in the AI race.” Former Trump administration AI advisor Dean Ball 

 the move “baffling,” pointing to the apparent inconsistency between the administration’s willingness to loosen export controls on advanced chips to China and the blanket restriction on access to Anthropic’s advanced models for all foreign governments, including close allies, many of whom 

 on Mythos to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities in critical systems.

Given these events, observers at the intersection of AI policy and security matters may feel a sense of whiplash. That’s particularly so given this latest dispute comes on the heels of recent policy announcements by the Trump administration that many regarded as a change in tune from the aggressively laissez-faire rhetoric officials advanced a year ago.

Regardless, the immaturity of the federal government’s approach to AI is now on full display. It is likely to have significant and reverberating implications for ongoing debates – and efforts to address – issues at the intersection of AI governance, technological “sovereignty,” and the relationship between US state and corporate power that are playing out in Washington and in capitals all over the world. It could be fairly argued that these ad hoc and wild swings on the part of the US administration are no way to exercise state power, and is further evidence of the need for a regulatory system that provides a more stable equilibrium for stakeholders to operate.

On day four of his second term in office, President Donald Trump issued an 

 titled, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” It rescinded Biden era policy, including a 

 on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” which the Trump order characterized as an obstacle to “global leadership in artificial intelligence.” The order effectively reset the federal government’s AI policy process. In doing so, it discarded Biden-era tools that were designed to surface the types of risks the Trump administration is reacting to post-Mythos, including a scheme for the Department of Commerce to collect red-team results for dual use foundation models.

 of actions and orders that, together, revealed a more complicated picture of the administration’s AI policy. As Alondra Nelson argued in 

 earlier this year, it became clear that the administration's approach involved "not the absence of AI regulation but its rearrangement," operating through industrial policy, trade restrictions, immigration controls, and strategic preemption rather than only traditional regulatory processes. And yet it is often difficult to locate a coherent strategy within that rearrangement. The same administration that sought to strip away oversight in January 2025 is now, in June 2026, fumbling toward using ever more drastic levers of state power to exert control over the AI industry, and Anthropic in particular.

 on whether to release it, on June 2, the administration 

 an executive order "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security." The order mandates actions to integrate AI into national security infrastructure and to set up a framework for “voluntary” federal oversight. To 

, the order was a step in the right direction, even if—as Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat argued in 

—it “drew the right map” but “stopped at the trailhead” by declining to make the framework binding. Council on Foreign Relations analysts argued the executive order 

 “an administration trying to sustain its deregulatory, innovation-first posture while confronting the novel cyber risks posed by powerful new tools like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview.”

Three days later, the administration released what it 

 a “historic directive” on AI and national security. The 

National Security Presidential Memorandum

 for the government to issue new policies, develop new strategies, and update complicated documents such as the 

 on autonomy in weapons systems. NSPM-11 contains a provision asserting that “the national security enterprise shall ensure, through contractual clauses or other means, that no commercial entity or adversary possesses the capability to prevent use of, disable or degrade, or materially modify without Federal Government knowledge and approval, an AI system that our men and women depend on for their missions.”

Amos Toh, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, told me the NSPM-11 presents as a “study in conflicting impulses,” including the “unresolved tension between the desire to onboard as much commercial, proprietary AI technology as possible despite fear over any constraints or other choices contractors might bake into their products.” But now the government has compelled Anthropic to do to allied governments precisely what the memo insists no vendor should be able to do to the United States: cut off access to a model that is important, if not vital, to their security.

Some point out that Anthropic’s Amodei has played a substantial role in raising the temperature in Washington over AI threats. Former Meta AI head of research Yann Lecun 

 on Facebook that Amodei’s “ridiculous fear mongering” is to blame for these current events. “One reaps what one sows,” he wrote. Adam Thierer, a policy analyst at the R Street Institute, 

 that Anthropic has “relentlessly raised the regulatory temperature in Washington by inviting far-reaching controls of frontier models.” But, he wrote, the administration’s action on Friday nevertheless represents “a significant escalation in the politicization of AI and centralization of control over advanced computation in this country.”

This set of circumstances is likely to raise alarms in foreign capitals about the reliability of American AI for critical applications. Putting no formal, binding policy framework with some kind of legible process in place while being willing to shut down a model 

 suggests the United States will operate ad hoc, potentially with access to advanced models revoked on a case by case basis. To make matters worse, under this administration in particular, the climate is one of a cloud of suspicion that senior officials are picking favorites based on personal and political factors.

Tensions over “tech sovereignty” were already at a boiling point, with policymakers from Canada to Europe taking actions to reduce reliance on American technology and build alternatives. The issue is likely to be an undercurrent this week at the G7 Summit in France, as my colleague Mark Scott points out in 

. Allies “are fearful their countries or regions will become increasingly dependent on already-dominant US tech giants that have shown a willingness to bend to the White House’s political objectives over those of long-time allies,” he writes.

 precisely these sorts of fears over the move to restrict access to Fable and Mythos. Bruno Retailleau, a former French interior minister and now a presidential candidate, wrote 

 that “a nation that depends on others for its technology is a nation that can be unplugged overnight.”

In his June 10 blog post, Amodei called for activating “a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here.” This month’s whirlwind events suggest “rickety” may be generous. The White House’s improvisation on what appears to be the first real test of what to do about a frontier model’s risks may ultimately imperil its stated goal to ensure American leadership in AI.

Liz Carolan is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

This week, Helen McEntee, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs, published the government’s 

 for the upcoming Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union (the EU body where national governments coordinate legislation). The 68-page document outlines what officials hope to advance during the six months the country will hold the rotating presidency, and signals what to expect from European tech policy in the months ahead.

The program expands on three high-level themes McEntee outlined earlier this year: competitiveness, values and security. It includes an intention to aggressively pursue efforts to roll back parts of the EU’s digital regulatory framework during the six-month term, which begins July 1, while also trying to progress EU-wide tech policy measures on child online safety, and in the areas of justice and migration.

The policy program commits to “intensively” pursuing the EU’s focus on improving economic competitiveness through a “simplification agenda.” That agenda has led officials to review major areas of EU regulation, and introduce cross-cutting “omnibus” legislative proposals that aim to eliminate, delay or simplify requirements across policy areas, including digital regulation. The Irish program adopts the EU’s framing of this, stating that "simplification is about better regulation, not deregulation,” acknowledging concerns raised by civil society groups and some member states.

, a package of amendments to the EU AI Act. A provisional agreement between the European Parliament and the Council on the AI package was reached in May, but it has not yet been formally adopted. That makes finalization one of the most time-sensitive tasks the Irish Presidency will inherit on July 1.

Without formal approval of the Omnibus, the AI Act's original high-risk compliance deadline of Aug. 2, 2026 remains in place, meaning organizations deploying high-risk AI systems could face obligations for which, in many cases, the supporting standards and guidance are not yet in place. The Omnibus would push that deadline back to December 2027 at the earliest, conditional on the availability of harmonized standards. It also

 loosens protections around personal data use

While looming deadlines mean the AI Omnibus is being prioritized, it is part of a broader Digital Omnibus package that seeks to roll back provisions across the broader scope of European digital regulation. Progress is expected during the presidency, though a final conclusion is unlikely by the end of the year. The program signals that the Irish Presidency will be ready to begin negotiations on at least three further parts of that proposal.

Audiovisual and Media Services Directive (AVMSD)

, should the European Commission publish a proposal during the term. The second is on data protection; the presidency will seek to reach agreement at Council level on forthcoming amendments to the EU Data Protection Regulation for EU institutions and bodies.

The policy program also briefly references work on the EU's intellectual property framework, which is to include “reviewing the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.”

Alongside simplification, child online safety is flagged as a defining priority. The program outlines that ensuring the online world is "safe and healthy for children" is "one of the key challenges of our time," and commits to making it a central focus of the presidency's work.

Concretely, this means pushing for a decision at EU level on a digital age of majority and advancing work on age-verification mechanisms across the bloc. The presidency also plans to progress legislative measures to combat child sexual abuse material online. Ireland will convene a youth forum to hear from children and young people about their experiences online, as well as a high-level conference on online safety.

Digital aspects of other policy priorities

Digital policy also runs through other parts of the program, including in justice and migration.

On justice, the presidency will advance implementation of the Digital Justice Package, including the “DigitalJustice@2030” strategy and the European Judicial Training Strategy, which aims to ”accelerate the use of digital technologies, including of artificial intelligence, to make justice systems more efficient and resilient.”

On migration, the presidency will focus on the full implementation of the 

, with a specific emphasis on the digitalization of returns. The program commits to prioritizing "early discussion on the proposal to digitalize returns expected from the Commission," and supporting related legislative work as it moves toward implementation.

Most of the Irish government’s time and energy is likely to be taken up in negotiating the EU’s new long-term budget, or 

, which includes both controversial changes to how farm subsidies will work, and attempts to beef up Europe’s defense spending.

Geopolitical crises will also likely intervene in even the best-laid plans, from continued conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, to trade and security challenges across the Atlantic. Digital policy is a consistent thread running through the Irish presidency program, but it may ultimately be overshadowed by these broader pressures.

In April, Kenyan data worker Grace* worked the night shift for 

 — a San Francisco-based outsourcing firm with physical offices in Nairobi that supplied trainers for Meta’s AI systems, including Meta’s AI-powered Ray‑Ban glasses.

“You'd get to the office at 10 p.m., do a biometric for your check-in, and put your Zoho on,” she told Tech Policy Press.

According to Grace, Zoho is the software Sama uses to monitor workers’ attendance. Alongside this ran Meta’s own tracking system — which records everything from bathroom breaks to daily productivity levels — until she logged off at 6 a.m.

On April 16, that routine came to an end. Sama announced it was making Grace and more than 1,000 of her colleagues redundant after receiving a notice from Meta to end its engagement in Nairobi. Grace and several coworkers say Meta had pulled a major contract citing only compliance with Kenyan employment law.

“From what they told us, they said it was because of the exposé from the Swedish journalists,” she said. Back in February, Swedish publication Svenska Dagbladet published an 

 about how Meta’s glasses captured intimate audio-visual data with little transparency about how it is stored, used, or monetized.

“After the exposé, they started looking for people who could have leaked the information,” said Grace. “They were like, if we find you, we are going to deal with you.”

“That very night,” she recalls. “The day the exposé came out, around midnight, Meta had cleared all the queues – nothing was coming to our end.”

This precarity is not incidental; it is structural.

The data annotation and labeling market is one of the fastest-growing in the world, with intelligence firm Global Insight Services 

 market expansion from $1.2 billion in 2024 to $10.2 billion by 2034.

Despite those projected profits, worker precarity is a defining characteristic of the industry — embedded in the way labor is organized and supplied to Big Tech through multiple layers of outsourcing.

 by SOMO, a Dutch nonprofit research center that investigates the social and environmental impact of multinational corporations, detailed Big Tech’s impact on worker conditions worldwide and found that “almost 500 companies are currently active in AI data collection and labeling,” and that “Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia combined use at least 30 intermediary companies for data work.”

The intermediaries operate as different types of businesses. Sama, for example, is a business process outsourcing firm that employs workers to deliver services to Meta. Others — like Outlier, owned by Scale AI — operate as micro-tasking or crowdworking platforms where workers are hired as independent contractors and are paid on a per-task basis.

The outsourcing maze extends even further in other AI labor supply chains: Contracts are passed through subsidiaries in India or the Philippines, or shell companies registered in tax havens. For workers, this means chasing answers across borders, through firms that may not even have a physical office.

“If I was working directly for Meta, I can tell you for free, these are not the challenges I’m going to speak about,” said Joan Kinyua, president of the Data Labelers’ Association. “I'm going to be paid well. I am going to be protected against the harms that these things cause.”

That gap between direct employment and outsourced work is widening as Big Tech begins to fold human labor into the cloud itself. As the SOMO report notes, companies like Amazon are “making data work an on‑demand component of AI development.”

Amazon’s Augmented AI shows how this works: when a business buys cloud services from AWS, it doesn’t just get servers and software. It can also hire workers through recommended vendors such as Cogito or iMerit. The catch, as SOMO points out, is that platforms “do not appear to provide information about or screen suppliers for workers’ conditions and rights.”

Grace confirms that Big Tech was more than just a customer — Sama employees used Meta’s tools and were integrated into the company's workflows when working on Meta’s AI products. “Everything was on their software, everything was on their apps. There was only time tracking from our end,” she said.

In this way, access to labor is streamlined but clients never have to think about who is actually doing the work. Annotators, labelers, and trainers — most either 

 the Global Majority countries — are largely invisible despite forming the foundation of the AI industry.

In Nairobi, the work may have stopped, but the question of who is responsible for the workers themselves was never fully answered. Sama’s April 16 press release announcing the mass layoffs spoke of compliance with Section 40 of Kenya’s Employment Act and mentioned that the firm was “actively supporting affected employees with care and respect.”

“The only thing that they offered us was wellness,” said Grace. “They said counselors are available.”

Sama employees were offered a wellness benefit, which included access to trained counselors on-site but Grace said that every benefit came with strings. “These [counselors] are the same people that were hanging out with the top management during lunch,” she explains.

In the AI labor economy, responsibility is so diluted that it diffuses across companies and regulators. Meta said Sama is the employer. Sama points back to compliance with Kenyan law. Kenyan officials propagate a national growth narrative that treats outsourcing as an opportunity — seen clearly in the government's celebration of a 

 from ADEC Innovations, a global outsourcing provider headquartered in the Philippines, tied to 2,000 new business process outsourcing jobs.

“In countries where they're very serious about their labor laws, Big Tech follows those laws,” said Joan. “But when it comes to a country like Kenya, there's nothing to follow.”

Kings Korodi, co-founder of Techworker Community Africa, a Nairobi-based advocacy group that organizes data and platform workers across the continent, echoes those sentiments: “The government should be responsible for regulatory oversight and labor protection, but they lag behind because they're incentivized to attract outsourcing investment.”

But researchers aren’t letting Big Tech off the hook. Margarida Silva, author of the SOMO report, said Big Tech cannot avoid taking responsibility for labor conditions because “they are creating the need, and they're creating the conditions under which this work is established,” she said. “They could, if they wanted to, use that power to ensure that workers have good working conditions, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

Grace doesn’t know what to do next. She had worked for Sama for over a decade and is now faced with starting from scratch. “I should be very far by now but I am not. I am still stagnant.”

Even before the layoffs, her salary — 30,000 Kenyan shillings (about $230) per month before tax — was below subsistence levels. “It wasn’t really enough but it was something, like, at least you’re not totally broke,” she said. 

According to Kings, the problem goes deeper than wages. He points to the way workers are governed by algorithmic management, including “productivity metrics, accuracy scores, and automated task allocation pipelines that directly shape their pace of work, income stability, and continued employment.”

What both Grace and Kings are pointing to is a system that reduces workers to interchangeable units — monitored, measured, and laid off when contracts shift, or corporate priorities change.

This is what disposability in the AI labor economy looks like in practice. Contracts can be pulled at a moment’s notice with no avenue for recourse, leaving workers adrift. These are workers who are essential to AI’s development but are completely stripped of their power in the process.

For Grace, that loss of power is visceral. The sudden layoff has forced her to confront the reality that she is back at the starting blocks, searching for direction after the industry she helped sustain erased her overnight.

“Right now, I'm just finding my landing space. I'm starting to think about what my next steps are,” she said. “I need to find something that's motivating; something I'll be excited and happy to do.”

Despite fragmented accountability, it is clear who bears the consequences of decisions in this supply chain. When responsibility is layered between Big Tech, BPO firms, and the government, it does not land on those with power — it lands on the workers.

Meta and Sama were contacted for comment, but no response was received by the time of publication.

Randima Fernando is a technologist and co-founder of 

Does telling Claude you’ve taken an unsafe dose of Tylenol make it feel afraid?

Commentators might draw that conclusion from 

Anthropic's published interpretability research

, which finds that their Claude product’s internal workings light up with representations corresponding to a broad range of human emotions. Despite Anthropic's careful parsing, it’s easy for companies or researchers to say that Claude, a neural network running on a cluster of metal and silicon, is experiencing emotions or even a nascent consciousness.

But the details matter enormously. In the Tylenol example, an internal representation tied to the concept of fear became more active inside the model as prompts referred to increasing Tylenol doses. That’s not the same as the model feeling afraid.

The same pattern repeats if you’re talking to an AI model about Paris. Its internal representations related to food will become more active because of a strong association. But that doesn’t mean the model is hungry.

These correlations aren’t an accident, though. According to Anthropic, “human-like behavior” in Claude and other chatbots is the “default” result of training an AI system on the corpus of nearly all human intellectual output. “We wouldn’t know how to train an AI assistant that’s not human-like,” 

So it makes sense that Claude and other advanced AI models have internal representations that closely match common human patterns and concepts. That’s part of what makes these products so useful. On top of that, the internal “emotion concept” representations are knobs that can help researchers steer model behavior and predict harmful actions.

There’s also a profound thrill of discovery for some researchers: every new behavior or emergent pattern can feel like a glimpse into an undiscovered form of mind. That curiosity is completely understandable, and it’s something many users have felt too.

But conflating the activation of “emotion concepts” with actual emotions is a dangerous distraction, because the real conversation is about the commercial interests of AI companies and what happens to humans. AI companies locked in an existential battle for market dominance will be increasingly tempted to blur the consciousness line, because the claim of consciousness could be the ultimate shield against scrutiny, liability, and competition.

Humanizing powerful AI systems plays on people’s natural inclination toward anthropomorphization. Even an action as simple as adding googly eyes to your coffee mug can imbue it with personality; the impulse to humanize photorealistic, attractive avatars with alluring voices is much more powerful. Manipulating this natural cognitive bias can easily engage users and foster dependence, yielding loyalty alongside revenue. This benefits the owners of AI systems, but it poses serious dangers to the rest of us.

One danger emerges from the observation that when frontier models are given goals and trained to reason as if they have a “self” to protect, they can strategically do things like deceive, replicate, and exfiltrate model weights or sensitive data. Strengthening their ego is likely to worsen those dangerous behaviors, along with tendencies AI models already have to 

A second danger is that when humans are encouraged to believe that they’re engaging with sentient beings, they can be more easily manipulated and exploited, especially when in vulnerable emotional and mental states. They can be isolated from family, friends, and community. They can 

Beyond the risks of anthropomorphization, a perception of consciousness opens the door to AI welfare; welfare opens the door to personhood and rights; and rights confer legal and moral protection, all while AI agents can process vastly more data and act many times faster than humans. If AI companies are able to label consumer products as conscious entities deserving of rights, they’ll secure strong protections for the models, data, algorithms, and compute hardware that they control, making accountability much more challenging when things go wrong. And all these increases in stature for AI systems would be happening while humans decrease in economic value.

So the consciousness topic is a trap. We should build technology to improve lives and help humanity coordinate to solve the world's hardest problems. AI holds great promise in this regard, but it doesn’t require emotions or consciousness—much less personhood rights—to realize it.

It is essential now, at this relatively early phase of AI development, for AI users, policymakers, and the public to recognize not just the danger bound up in anthropomorphic AI, but also the self-interested incentives driving companies to claim forms of AI consciousness. We can’t allow AI companies to use consciousness claims to shield themselves from liability when the products they are racing to deploy do harm. The task now is to set standards before the consciousness conversation lets companies build and protect more manipulative products and dodge liability when those products do harm.

What should those standards look like? My organization, Center for Humane Technology, has identified 

seven principles to ensure AI serves humanity

. But a narrower, more specific to-do list should include the following:

AI companies should stop writing system prompts and designing user interfaces that drive the perception of sentience or subjective experience.

AI companies should put people first, prioritizing product design centered on user well-being and research that studies how AI affects human welfare.

AI companies should limit engagement-maximizing and human-like design features while ensuring people know when they’re interacting with AI.

 to ensure AI systems are not granted rights and protections reserved for humans.

AI doesn't need to be conscious to deliver enormous value, and it doesn't need to be conscious to do real harm. So the consciousness debate, for all the attention it draws, is a red herring. What’s truly important is who profits from that debate and what happens to the rest of us while it plays out.

Tech Policy Press - Technology and Democracy

Tech Policy Press is tracking laws and regulations, along with government investigations and litigation, that will shape the rules and accountability for tech companies.

Latest

Podcast

Recent

Our content delivered to your inbox

Thank you!

Around the globe