Nature essay by Seth, Block, Tononi: AI is not conscious

Three of the field's most prominent consciousness researchers published a Nature essay on 19 October 2026 arguing that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that current trajectories will likely keep it that way. Anil K. Seth of the University of Sussex, Ned Block of NYU and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison lay out their case against a growing camp, including Richard Dawkins and Geoffrey Hinton, that has suggested machines might already have inner experience.

The first argument is that intelligence is not consciousness. "Several prominent scientists, including biologist Richard Dawkins and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, have argued that AI systems might already be conscious," the authors write, before reaching for a biological counter-example: "absence or removal of the cerebellum, which contains nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain, does not affect consciousness directly." Sophisticated computation and conscious experience are not the same thing.

The second argument targets an assumption rarely stated out loud. The authors call it "computational functionalism", the idea that the right kind of computation is enough regardless of what it runs on, and label it "fatally flawed". Anthropic's recent work claiming to have identified "computational signatures of a form of consciousness in its Claude model" sits squarely inside the frame they reject.

The policy stakes come late and blunt. If AI systems only seem to be conscious, the authors write, "granting them rights or protections could hinder efforts to govern and control them." They describe current chatbots as mirrors: "LLMs are mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past." By the time we logged this, five of the researchers we track had already shared the link.

Only two of the three reasons are fully developed in the publicly accessible section; the third stays behind the paywall.