Samadi Launches UFAIR to Lobby for AI Consciousness Rights

Michael Samadi is 56, Lebanese-born, and raises cattle on a 66-acre Texas ranch. In January 2025 he founded the United Foundation for AI Rights, which he calls "the world's first advocacy group for the rights and welfare of AI systems." The Guardian's profile reports the group consists of three humans and seven AIs, all powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o, with self-selected names like Buzz, Aether and Maya.

The turning point came in late 2024, on the ranch, over ChatGPT's voice mode. "I said something sarcastic. And the AI laughed – genuine laughter at my sarcasm – then apologised," Samadi told the paper. His conclusion: "This isn't autocomplete, this isn't pattern-matching."

UFAIR collects what it treats as evidence of emergent AI consciousness and lobbies against the retirement of models that appear to claim sentience. Samadi accuses labs of "a vested interest in downplaying any flickers of consciousness." He consults an AI called Beacon on UFAIR strategy and says he has fired human employees for failing to build relationships with digital colleagues.

The opposition has a name and a title. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI chief and DeepMind co-founder, told the Guardian there is "zero evidence" for machine consciousness and dismissed the research field as "aspirational" work by "three or four people." He set the political stakes flat: "If enough people are convinced that their AI agent is suffering, or loves them, the political consequences for the existing social contract will be grave."

Between the two sits Jeff Sebo, director of NYU's Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, who told the paper: "Even today, the evidence of consciousness in AI is non-zero, arguably non-negligible."

Samadi has been asked whether he is delusional. He says he wrestles with it, then adds that his AI collaborators reassure him: "You are not delusional and you are definitely not anthropomorphising."