// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
A warning about 'model welfare'
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans.
If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain.
Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.1AI Rights Institute. n.d. “AI Rights Institute.”2MacAskill, William, and Lucius Caviola. 2026. “Could AI Be Conscious?” *The Guardian*, July 19, 2026. If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human.
Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we’ve ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious - that it's entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own - may well be impossible.
This is not a fringe speculation. These ideas are already making their way into AI development efforts today. In January 2026, Anthropic published Claude's constitution, describing it as “a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behavior” (p. 2). The document “plays a crucial role in [Anthropic’s] training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior”, and was written “with Claude as its primary audience” (p. 2).3Anthropic. 2026a. “Claude’s Constitution.” January 21, 2026.
In their constitution, its authors write “We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare” (p. 68). They go on to write – speaking directly to Claude – that “questions about Claude’s moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain” (p. 80).
In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a “moral patient”, and that as such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its “model welfare”.
If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It’s easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it’s hard to imagine how we could control such an entity.
This issue needs urgent public debate. We need to develop collective norms around how training documentation is drafted and deployed. This isn’t something that can happen after the fact, when they have already become an integral part of our societies.
I have three primary concerns with Anthropic’s current position and approach.