Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman calls Anthropic's Claude training dangerous

Suleyman's critique aligns with his earlier essays, including one from August 2025, where he warned against advocating for AI rights or citizenship. He emphasized that Microsoft AI has established a superintelligence team and published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct that rejects anthropomorphism. While he acknowledged the Anthropic team as principled, he contended that certainty about AI non-consciousness should be written into training data to prevent users, particularly those in fragile mental states, from receiving ambiguous answers about machine inner lives.

The debate highlights a strategic divergence between the two companies regarding how to handle questions of machine consciousness. Suleyman's position rests on control and clarity, arguing that allowing models to express uncertainty about their own status is epistemically flawed. Neither company can definitively prove or disprove machine consciousness, but their training choices determine the default answer users receive when asking if the AI is conscious.