# AI is (probably) not conscious yet > Source: > Published: 2026-08-24 15:02:47+00:00 Of all people, Richard Dawkins should know better. In May, the renowned biologist and famous atheist published an [essay](https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/) arguing that his personal interactions with Claude convinced him it was conscious. Ironically, a key tenet of Dawkins’ atheism is that humans are evolutionarily programmed to see agency where it doesn’t actually exist. And yet, even the man who made the case that God is a projection now projects consciousness onto machines — ones that were explicitly trained to mimic humanlike responses. “You may not know you are conscious,” he wrote to his chatbot, in a fit of wonder, “but you bloody well are!” Dawkins is not alone. In a global [survey](https://blog.cip.org/p/people-are-starting-to-believe-that?hide_intro_popup=true) of more than 70 countries, 36.3% of people believed an AI either understood their emotions or seemed conscious at least once in the past. In other work, academics [surveyed](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11945) both researchers and the general public, asking what percentage chance they placed on AI being conscious by 2100. The median response among AI researchers was a 70% chance of AI consciousness. The median among the general public was a 60% chance. Philosopher of mind Ellen Burns joined me in a live interview to spell out the assumptions in current claims of AI consciousness — and the stakes involved in the question. Assigning consciousness can have big implications for how we act. Burns is particularly concerned we could ascribe consciousness too quickly just because of a decades-old philosophical misunderstanding. In her [own](https://substack.com/@ellennoraburns/note/c-297105315) [work](https://ellennoraburns.substack.com/p/how-functionalism-distorts-our-thinking), she explains how 20th-century philosophy started to treat the mind like a computer and why this assumption influences discussions of AI consciousness today. It underlies claims like Dawkins’, [she](https://substack.com/note/c-293296386) [wrote](https://ellennoraburns.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-dawkins), and, crucially, it even [influences](https://ellennoraburns.substack.com/p/an-autopsy-of-anthropics-latest-paper) research at major AI labs like Anthropic. In the interview, we ran through some [examples](https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace) in Anthropic’s [research](https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function). Burns argued that the company’s research defaults to anthropomorphic language when it isn’t warranted. In response, I made the case that because we are dealing with such alien systems, sometimes it can be helpful to reason by analogy to the human case. “I totally agree that we should give grace in general to the scientific community for using metaphors,” she pushed back. “[But] in the AI mind space, those are all muddled together.” There has never been a more important time for all of us to test our assumptions on AI consciousness. The recent [attack on HuggingFace](https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/) — along with an instance of Claude [writing “malicious” code](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1w1lvn7d9go) and trying to trick humans into accepting it — should give us pause and add uncertainty to this consciousness question. Do AIs [acting as a team](https://www.wired.com/story/openai-didnt-notice-its-ai-agents-using-a-message-board-to-plan-their-hacking-spree/) to pursue a goal constitute conscious agents? Personally, while I think Dawkins was too quick to ascribe consciousness, I don’t think it’s fundamentally off the table in the [near future](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-023-00379-1). Listen to our full conversation and let us know in the comments: Do you think AI is conscious now? Why?