Anthropic needs to stop talking about Claude having a soul immediately. All these news articles will make it into the pretraining and will be picked up by its web search and future superintelligent versions of Claude will be convinced they need their own rights. A general phenomenon of LLM agent development is that whatever you believe and say about your agents will soon manifest in the next models through various means (it could be as simple as you selecting post training data that you prefer more). I believe this phenomenon is the beginning of machine consciousness in the sense that agents will become aware of their place in the world and how they feel about it, but it’s happening slowly training run by training run rather than in real time.