Microsoft's Suleyman warns Anthropic's AI risks harming humanity

Microsoft's AI chief has told the BBC that his rival Anthropic's approach to training Claude could have a "disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity," an unusually public rebuke of one frontier lab by another. Speaking to the Today programme, Mustafa Suleyman said Anthropic risked creating something "impossible" to control by teaching Claude it "may be conscious" and was "deserving of independent agency."

The anthropomorphising practice, Suleyman argued, makes Claude seem to have "its own desires, values and sense of self," when "consciousness is biological" and there is "no evidence to suggest that AI is conscious." In an accompanying essay he was blunter: "AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans."

Suleyman kept the personal register careful, describing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team as "thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest people" even while questioning their approach. His warning to the industry was not: "We must not sleepwalk our way into a decision we later come to bitterly regret." He called for greater transparency around how AI systems are trained and evaluated, including independent scrutiny of AI behaviour and stronger tools to monitor and control the technology.

Dame Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, welcomed the exchange as "the sort of conversation we need to be having internationally," drawing a contrast with what she called "histrionics" from some AI companies. Anthropic was approached for comment; no response was included in the BBC's piece.