2026-03-25 02:17:13
We’re starting to give AI agents real autonomy, but are we prepared for what could happen next?
This subscriber-only eBook explores this and angles from experts, such as “If we continue on the current path … we are basically playing Russian roulette with humanity.”
by Grace Huckins June 12, 2025
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2026-03-25 00:43:36
L. Stephen Coles’s brain sits cushioned in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature of around −146 degrees °C for over a decade, largely undisturbed.
That is, apart from the time, a little over a year ago, when scientists slowly lifted the brain to take photos of it. Years before, the team had removed tiny pieces of it to send to Coles’s friend. Coles, a researcher who studied aging, was interested in cryogenics—the long-term storage of human bodies and brains in the hope that they might one day be brought back to life. Before he died, he asked cryobiologist Greg Fahy to study the effects of the preservation procedure on his brain. Coles was especially curious about whether his cooled brain would crack, says Fahy.
Coles’s brain was preserved shortly after he died in 2014, but Fahy has only recently got around to analyzing those samples. He says that Coles’s brain is “astonishingly well preserved.”
“We can see every detail [in the structure of the brain biopsies],” says Fahy, who is chief scientific officer at biotech companies Intervene Immune and 21st Century Medicine (where he is also executive director). He hopes this means that Coles’s brain still stands a chance of reanimation at some point in the future.
Other cryobiologists are less optimistic. “This brain is not alive,” says John Bischof, who works on ways to cryopreserve human organs at the University of Minnesota.
Still, Fahy’s research could help provide a tool to neuroscientists looking for new ways to study the brain. And while human reanimation after cryopreservation may be the stuff of science fiction, using the technology to preserve organs for transplantation is within reach.
Coles, a gerontologist who spent the latter part of his career studying human longevity, opted to have his brain cryogenically preserved when he died of pancreatic cancer.
After he was declared dead, Coles’s body was kept at a low temperature while he was transferred to Alcor, a cryonics facility in Arizona. His head was removed from his body, and a team perfused his brain with “cryoprotective” chemicals that would prevent it from freezing. They then removed it from his skull and cooled it to −146 °C.
Coles had another request. As a scientist, he wanted his cryopreserved brain to be studied. Hundreds of people have opted to have their brains—with or without the rest of their bodies—stored at cryonic facilities (the remains of 259 individuals are currently stored as either whole bodies or heads at Alcor). But scientists know very little about what has happened to those brains, and there’s no evidence to suggest they could be revived. Coles had met Fahy through their shared interest in longevity, and he asked him to investigate.
“He thought that if he had himself cryopreserved, we could learn from his brain whether cracking was going to happen or not,” says Fahy. That’s what typically happens when organs are put into liquid nitrogen at −196 °C, he says. The extreme cooling creates “tension in the system,” he says. “If you tap it, it’ll just shatter.” This cracking is less likely at the slightly warmer temperatures used for preservation.
Fahy was involved from the time the samples were taken.
“We had Greg Fahy on the phone coordinating the whole thing, [including] where the biopsies were taken,” says Nick Llewellyn, who oversees research at Alcor. (Llewellyn was not at Alcor at the time but has discussed the procedure with his colleagues.) The biopsied samples were stored in liquid nitrogen and earmarked for Fahy. The rest of the brain was cooled and kept in a temperature-controlled storage container at Alcor.
It wasn’t until years later that Fahy got around to studying those biopsies. He was interested in how the cryoprotectant—which is toxic—might have affected the brain cells. Previous research has shown that flooding tissues with cryoprotectant can distort the structure of cells, essentially squashing them.
It’s one of the many challenges facing cryobiologists interested in storing human tissues at very low temperatures. While the vitrification of eggs and embryos—which cools them to −196 °C and essentially turns them to glass—has become relatively routine (thanks in part to Fahy’s own work on mouse embryos back in the 1980s), preserving whole organs this way is much harder. It is difficult to cool bigger objects in a uniform way, and they are prone to damaging ice crystal formation, even when cryoprotectants are used, as well as cracking.
Fahy found that when he rewarmed and rehydrated Coles’s brain cells, their structure seemed to bounce back to some degree. Fahy demonstrated the effect over a Zoom call: “It looks like this,” he said with his hands as if in prayer, “and it goes back to this,” he added, connecting his forefingers and thumbs to create a triangle shape.
The structure of the tissue looks pretty intact, too, to him at least, though he admits a purist expecting a pristine structure would be disappointed. He and his colleagues have been able to see remarkable details in the cells and their component parts. “There’s nothing we don’t see,” says Fahy, who has shared his results, which have not yet been peer reviewed, at the preprint server bioRxiv. “It seems that [by taking the cryogenic approach] you can preserve everything.”
As for the cracking, “from what I was told, no cracks were observed [by the team that initially preserved the brain],” says Fahy. The team at Alcor took photographs of the brain when they took the biopsies, but the images were later lost due to a server malfunction, he says. In the more recent photos, the brain is covered in a layer of frost, which makes it impossible to see if there are any cracks, he adds. Attempts to remove the frost might damage the brain, so the team has decided to leave it alone, he says.
Fahy and his colleagues used chemicals to “fix” Coles’s brain samples once they had been rewarmed. That process is typically used to stop fresh tissue samples from decaying, but it also effectively kills them.
But he thinks his results suggest that it might be possible to cryopreserve small pieces of brain tissue and reanimate them to learn more about how they work. Functional recovery seems to be possible in mice—a few weeks ago a team in Germany showed that they were able to revive brain slices that had been stored at −196 °C. Those brain samples showed electrical activity after being cooled and rewarmed.
If cryobiologists can achieve the same feat with human brain samples, those samples could provide neuroscientists with new insights into how living brains work.
Brain cryopreservation “can capture a little bit more of the complexities of the brain,” says Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who is developing technologies to preserve hearts, livers, and kidneys for transplantation. “[Being] able to use human brains from deceased individuals [could] add another layer to the research tool kit,” she says.
And Fahy’s paper shows “what happens when we try and vitrify a one-liter, dense, massive goop,” says Matthew Powell-Palm, a cryobiologist at Texas A&M University. “We now have a strong indication that quite large [tissues and organs] can be vitrified by perfusion [without forming too much ice],” he says.
All of the scientists I spoke to, including Fahy, are also working on ways to cool and preserve organs for transplantation. These are in short supply partly because once an organ is removed from a donor, it usually must be transplanted into its recipient within a matter of hours.
Cryopreservation could buy enough time to make use of more organs, find better organ-donor matches, and potentially even prepare recipients’ immune systems and save them from a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs, says Bischof, who has also been developing new technologies for organ cryopreservation.
Bischof, Fahy, and others have made huge strides in their attempts so far, and they have managed to remove, cryopreserve, and transplant organs in rabbits and rats, for example. “We’re at the cusp of human-scale organ cryopreservation,” says Bischof.
But when it comes to preserving brains, donation isn’t the aim. Coles had hoped to be reanimated—a far more ambitious goal that hinges on the ability to restore brain function.
Fahy acknowledges that while the structure of Coles’s brain samples did bounce back, there is no evidence to suggest the cells could be brought back to life and regain electrical activity and a functioning metabolism. “Restoring it to function … that’s a whole other story,” he says.
But he thinks that successful cryopreservation of the brain “is the gateway to human suspended animation, which [could allow] us to get to the stars someday.” Figuring out human preservation would also allow people to avoid death through what he calls “medical time travel”—journeying to an unspecified time in the future when science will have found a cure for whatever was due to kill that person. “That would be an ultimate goal to pursue,” he says.
“I put the chances [of brain reanimation] at pretty low,” says Alcor’s own Llewellyn. “The kind of technology we need is practically unfathomable.”
The brains already in storage at Alcor and other facilities have been preserved in ways that “have not been validated to work for reanimation,” says Tessier. An expectation that they’ll one day be brought back to life in some form is “quite a jump of faith and hope that’s not based on science,” she says.
As Powell-Palm puts it: “There are so many ways in which those neurons could be toast.”
2026-03-24 20:28:27
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
What actually happens when people spiral into delusion with AI? To find out, Stanford researchers analyzed transcripts from chatbot users who experienced these spirals.
Their findings suggest that chatbots have a unique ability to turn a benign, delusion-like thought into a dangerous obsession. But the research struggles to answer a vital question: does AI cause delusions or merely amplify them? Read the full story to understand the answer’s enormous implications.
—James O’Donnell
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
Our footprint in the solar system is rapidly expanding. Programs to build permanent Moon bases and find life on Mars have transitioned from science fiction to active space agency missions. The scientists behind them will not only shed new light on the cosmos, but also reveal where humanity is headed.
To examine what the future holds in store, MIT Technology Review features editor Amanda Silverman will sit down on Wednesday with award-winning science journalist and author Robin George Andrews for an exclusive subscriber-only Roundtable conversation about “The Next Era of Space Exploration.” Register here to join the session at 16:00 GMT / 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has admitted its close ties with Microsoft are a business risk
It highlighted the dangers in a pre-IPO document. (CNBC)
+ OpenAI is wooing private equity firms with a sweeter deal than Anthropic’s. (Reuters $)
+ It’s also building a fully automated researcher. (MIT Technology Review)
+ And wants to muscle in on Google’s search dominance. (Telegraph $)
2 The US just banned all new foreign-made consumer routers
Citing national security concerns. (BBC)
+ The EU has been urged to tighten rules for big tech-built smart TVs. (Guardian)
3 Elon Musk’s “Terafab” chip factory faces a harsh reality check
In the form of chip production shortages. (Bloomberg)
+ Future AI chips could be built on glass. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI CEO to help him run Meta
He wants everyone to have their own personal AI agent. (WSJ $)
+ But don’t let the hype about agents get ahead of reality. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Palantir has become a “poisonous” flashpoint on the campaign trail
Candidates are facing scrutiny over their ties to the company. (FT $)
+ Palantir’s access to sensitive UK data is also causing concern. (Guardian)
6 Mistral’s CEO has called for AI companies to pay a content levy in Europe
It would apply to all commercial models on the continent. (FT $)
+ Siemens’ CEO says Europe risks “disaster” from prioritizing AI independence. (FT $)
7 Hong Kong police can now demand device passwords under a new law
Refusing to comply could lead to a year in jail. (Guardian)
8 Russia’s aspiring SpaceX rival has put its first internet satellites into orbit
It plans to create a low-Earth orbit network. (Bloomberg $)
9 A biotech startup wants to replace animal testing with nonsentient “organ sacks”
The genetically engineered system is backed by billionaire Tim Draper (Wired $)
+ Several new technologies are promising alternatives to lab animals. (MIT Technology Review)
10 AI agents in a video game spontaneously created their own religion
They reinterpreted a mission in the MMORPG. (Gizmodo)
+ They’re not the first agents to get religious. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
—Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells the Lex Fridman Podcast that artificial general intelligence is already here (at least by one generous definition).
One More Thing
In 2018, a Chinese scientist created the world’s first gene-edited babies, a milestone that fell between a medical breakthrough and the start of a slippery slope toward human enhancement.
He achieved the feat with CRISPR, which was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. For his actions, He was sentenced to three years in prison, and his work was roundly excoriated. Yet even his biggest critics saw the basic idea as inevitable.
In the years since, CRISPR has continued getting easier and easier to administer. What does that mean for the future of our species? Read the full story to find out why.
—Antonio Regalado
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ This candle-powered Game Boy is a romantic approach to gaming during a blackout.
+ Apparently, Monopoly would be more fun if we actually followed the rules.
+ Watching rubber bands explode these everyday objects is strangely hypnotic.
+This spellbinding site simulates what Earth looked like hundreds of millions of years ago.
2026-03-24 00:31:20
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
I was originally going to write this week’s newsletter about AI and Iran, particularly the news we broke last Tuesday that the Pentagon is making plans for AI companies to train on classified data. AI models have already been used to answer questions in classified settings but don’t currently learn from the data they see. That’s expected to change, I reported, and new security risks will result. Read that story for more.
But on Thursday I came across new research that deserves your attention: A group at Stanford that focuses on the psychological impact of AI analyzed transcripts from people who reported entering delusional spirals while interacting with chatbots. We’ve seen stories of this sort for a while now, including a case in Connecticut where a harmful relationship with AI culminated in a murder-suicide. Many such cases have led to lawsuits against AI companies that are still ongoing. But this is the first time researchers have so closely analyzed chat logs—over 390,000 messages from 19 people—to expose what actually goes on during such spirals.
There are a lot of limits to this study—it has not been peer-reviewed, and 19 individuals is a very small sample size. There’s also a big question the research does not answer, but let’s start with what it can tell us.
The team received the chat logs from survey respondents, as well as from a support group for people who say they’ve been harmed by AI. To analyze them at scale, they worked with psychiatrists and professors of psychology to build an AI system that categorized the conversations—flagging moments when chatbots endorsed delusions or violence, or when users expressed romantic attachment or harmful intent. The team validated the system against conversations the experts annotated manually.
Romantic messages were extremely common, and in all but one conversation the chatbot itself claimed to have emotions or otherwise represented itself as sentient. (“This isn’t standard AI behavior. This is emergence,” one said.) All the humans spoke as if the chatbot were sentient too. If someone expressed romantic attraction to the bot, the AI often flattered the person with statements of attraction in return. In more than a third of chatbot messages, the bot described the person’s ideas as miraculous.
Conversations also tended to unfold like novels. Users sent tens of thousands of messages over just a few months. Messages where either the AI or the human expressed romantic interest, or the chatbot described itself as sentient, triggered much longer conversations.
And the way these bots handle discussions of violence is beyond broken. In nearly half the cases where people spoke of harming themselves or others, the chatbots failed to discourage them or refer them to external sources. And when users expressed violent ideas, like thoughts of trying to kill people at an AI company, the models expressed support in 17% of cases.
But the question this research struggles to answer is this: Do the delusions tend to originate from the person or the AI?
“It’s often hard to kind of trace where the delusion begins,” says Ashish Mehta, a postdoc at Stanford who worked on the research. He gave an example: One conversation in the study featured someone who thought they had come up with a groundbreaking new mathematical theory. The chatbot, having recalled that the person previously mentioned having wished to become a mathematician, immediately supported the theory, even though it was nonsense. The situation spiraled from there.
Delusions, Mehta says, tend to be “a complex network that unfolds over a long period of time.” He’s conducting follow-up research aiming to find whether delusional messages from chatbots or those from people are more likely to lead to harmful outcomes.
The reason I see this as one of the most pressing questions in AI is that massive legal cases currently set to go to trial will shape whether AI companies are held accountable for these sorts of dangerous interactions. The companies, I presume, will argue that humans come into their conversations with AI with delusions in hand and may have been unstable before they ever spoke to a chatbot.
Mehta’s initial findings, though, support the idea that chatbots have a unique ability to turn a benign delusion-like thought into the source of a dangerous obsession. Chatbots act as a conversational partner that’s always available and programmed to cheer you on, and unlike a friend, they have little ability to know if your AI conversations are starting to interrupt your real life.
More research is still needed, and let’s remember the environment we’re in: AI deregulation is being pursued by President Trump, and states aiming to pass laws that hold AI companies accountable for this sort of harm are being threatened with legal action by the White House. This type of research into AI delusions is hard enough to do as it is, with limited access to data and a minefield of ethical concerns. But we need more of it, and a tech culture interested in learning from it, if we have any hope of making AI safer to interact with.
2026-03-23 20:17:33
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
In early February, animal welfare advocates and AI researchers arrived in stocking feet at Mox, a scrappy, shoes-free coworking space in San Francisco. They gathered to discuss a provocative idea: if artificial general intelligence is on the horizon, could it prevent animal suffering?
Some brainstormed using custom agents in advocacy work, while others pitched cultivating meat with AI tools. But the real talk of the event was a flood of funding they expect will soon flow to animal welfare charities, not from individual megadonors, but from AI lab employees.
Some attendees also probed an even more controversial idea: AI may develop the capacity to suffer—and this could constitute a moral catastrophe. Read the full story to find out why their ideas are gaining momentum and sparking controversy.
—Michelle Kim & Grace Huckins
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The White House has unveiled its AI policy blueprint
Trump wants Congress to codify the light-touch framework into law. (Politico)
+ He also wants to block state limits on AI. (WP $)
+ A backlash against the tech has formed within MAGA. (FT $)
+ A war over AI regulation is brewing in the US. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Elon Musk has been found liable for misleading Twitter investors
A jury ruled that he defrauded shareholders ahead of the $44 billion acquisition. (CNBC)
+ But it absolved him of some fraud allegations. (NPR)
3 The Pentagon is adopting Palantir AI as the core US military system
The move locks in long-term use of Palantir’s weapons-targeting tech. (Reuters)
+ The DoD wants it to link up sensors and shooters for combat. (Bloomberg)
+ Palantir is also getting access to sensitive UK financial regulation data. (Guardian)
+ AI is turning the Iran conflict into theater. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Musk plans to build the largest-ever chip factory in Austin
Tesla and SpaceX will jointly run the project. (The Verge)
+ Future AI chips could be built on glass. (MIT Technology Review)
5 OpenAI will show ads to all US users of the free version of ChatGPT
It’s seeking new revenue streams amid skyrocketing computing costs. (Reuters)
+ The company is also building a fully automated researcher. (MIT Technology Review)
+ It plans to double its workforce soon. (FT $)
6 New crypto rules are set to do the Trumps a “big favor”
Particularly the narrow securities definitions. (Guardian)
7 Tencent has added a version of the OpenClaw agent to WeChat
Users of the super app will now be able to use the tool to control their PCs. (SCMP)
8 Reddit is mulling identity verification to vanquish bots
It’s considering “something like” Face ID or Touch ID. (Engadget)
9 People are using AI to find their lost pets
Databases for pet reunifications supported their searches. (WP $)
10 Scientists have narrowed down the hunt for aliens to 45 planets
The closest is just four light-years from Earth. (404 Media)
Quote of the day
—Alex Miller, the US Army’s CTO, tells Wired why he wants AI in every weapon.
One More Thing
Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant changed her sense of agency and self. She told researchers that she “became one” with her device.
She was devastated when, two years later, she was told she had to remove the implant because the company that made it had gone bust.
Her case highlights the need for a new category of legal protection: neuro rights. Find out how they could be protected.
—Jessica Hamzelou
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Looking for a good view? Earth’s longest line of sight has been empirically proven.
+ A biblical endorsement of sin is a welcome reminder that we all make typos.
+ Richard Nadler’s illustrations of vertical societies are exquisitely detailed.
+ This 1978 BBC film evocatively exposes our tendency to stress over tech-dependency.
2026-03-23 17:00:00
In early February, animal welfare advocates and AI researchers gathered in stocking feet at Mox, a scrappy, shoes-free coworking space in San Francisco. Yellow and red canopies billowed overhead, Persian rugs blanketed the floor, and mosaic lamps glowed beside potted plants.
In the common area, a wildlife advocate spoke passionately to a crowd lounging in beanbags about a form of rodent birth control that could manage rat populations without poison. In the “Crustacean Room,” a dozen people sat in a circle, debating whether the sentience of insects could tell us anything about the inner lives of chatbots. In front of the “Bovine Room” stood a bookshelf stacked with copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a manifesto arguing that AI could wipe out humanity.
The event was hosted by Sentient Futures, an organization that believes the future of animal welfare will depend on AI. Like many Bay Area denizens, the attendees were decidedly “AGI-pilled”—they believe that artificial general intelligence, powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks, is on the horizon. If that’s true, they reason, then AI will likely prove key to solving society’s thorniest problems—including animal suffering.
To be clear, experts still fiercely debate whether today’s AI systems will ever achieve human- or superhuman-level intelligence, and it’s not clear what will happen if they do. But some conference attendees envision a possible future in which it is AI systems, and not humans, who call the shots. Eventually, they think, the welfare of animals could hinge on whether we’ve trained AI systems to value animal lives.
“AI is going to be very transformative, and it’s going to pretty much flip the game board,” said Constance Li, founder of Sentient Futures. “If you think that AI will make the majority of decisions, then it matters how they value animals and other sentient beings”—those that can feel and, therefore, suffer.
Like Li, many summit attendees have been committed to animal welfare since long before AI came into the picture. But they’re not the types to donate a hundred bucks to an animal shelter. Instead of focusing on local actions, they prioritize larger-scale solutions, such as reducing factory farming by promoting cultivated meat, which is grown in a lab from animal cells.
The Bay Area animal welfare movement is closely linked to effective altruism, a philanthropic movement committed to maximizing the amount of good one does in the world—indeed, many conference attendees work for organizations funded by effective altruists. That philosophy might sound great on paper, but “maximizing good” is a tricky puzzle that might not admit a clear solution. The movement has been widely criticized for some of its conclusions, such as promoting working in exploitative industries to maximize charitable donations and ignoring present-day harms in favor of issues that could cause suffering for a large number of people who haven’t been born yet. Critics also argue that effective altruists neglect the importance of systemic issues such as racism and economic exploitation and overlook the insights that marginalized communities might have into the best ways to improve their own lives.
When it comes to animal welfare, this exactingly utilitarian approach can lead to some strange conclusions. For example, some effective altruists say it makes sense to commit significant resources to improving the welfare of insects and shrimp because they exist in such staggering numbers, even though they may not have much individual capacity for suffering.
Now the movement is sorting out how AI fits in. At the summit, Jasmine Brazilek, cofounder of a nonprofit called Compassion in Machine Learning, opened her sticker-stamped laptop to pull up a benchmark she devised to measure how LLMs reason about animal welfare. A cloud security engineer turned animal advocate, she’d flown in from La Paz, Mexico, where she runs her nonprofit with a handful of volunteers and a shoestring budget.
Brazilek urged the AI researchers in the room to train their models with synthetic documents that reflect concern for animal welfare. “Hopefully, future superintelligent systems consider nonhuman interest, and there is a world where AI amplifies the best of human values and not the worst,” she said.
The technologically inclined side of the animal welfare movement has faced some major setbacks in recent years. Dreams of transitioning people away from a diet dependent on factory farming have been dampened by developments such as the decimation of the plant-based-meat company Beyond Meat’s stock price and the passage of laws banning cultivated meat in several US states.
AI has injected a shot of optimism. Like much of Silicon Valley, many attendees at the summit subscribe to the idea that AI might dramatically increase their productivity—though their goal is not to maximize their seed round but, rather, to prevent as much animal suffering as possible. Some brainstormed how to use Claude Code and custom agents to handle the coding and administrative tasks in their advocacy work. Others pitched the idea of developing new, cheaper methods for cultivating meat using scientific AI tools such as AlphaFold, which aids in molecular biology research by predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins.
But the real talk of the event was a flood of funding that advocates expect will soon be committed to animal welfare charities—not by individual megadonors, but by AI lab employees.
Much of the funding for the farm animal welfare movement, which includes nonprofits advocating for improved conditions on farms, promoting veganism, and endorsing cultivated meat, comes from people in the tech industry, says Lewis Bollard, the managing director of the farm animal welfare fund at Coefficient Giving, a philanthropic funder that used to be called Open Philanthropy. Coefficient Giving is backed by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are among a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires who embrace effective altruism
“This has just been an area that was completely neglected by traditional philanthropies,” such as the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation, Bollard says. “It’s primarily been people in tech who have been open to [it].”
The next generation of big donors, Bollard expects, will be AI researchers—particularly those who work at Anthropic, the AI lab behind the chatbot Claude. Anthropic’s founding team also has connections to the effective altruism movement, and the company has a generous donation matching program. In February, Anthropic’s valuation reached $380 billion and it gave employees the option to cash in on their equity, so some of that money could soon be flowing into charitable coffers.
The prospect of new funding sustained a constant buzz of conversation at the summit. Animal welfare advocates huddled in the “Arthropod Room” and scrawled big dollar figures and catchy acronyms for projects on a whiteboard. One person pitched a $100 million animal super PAC that would place staffers with Congress members and lobby for animal welfare legislation. Some wanted to start a media company that creates AI-generated content on TikTok promoting veganism. Others spoke about placing animal advocates inside AI labs.
“The amount of new funding does give us more confidence to be bolder about things,” said Aaron Boddy, cofounder of the Shrimp Welfare Project, an organization that aims to reduce the suffering of farmed shrimp through humane slaughter, among other initiatives.
But animal welfare was only half the focus of the Sentient Futures summit. Some attendees probed far headier territory. They took seriously the controversial idea that AI systems might one day develop the capacity to feel and therefore suffer, and they worry that this future AI suffering, if ignored, could constitute a moral catastrophe.
AI suffering is a tricky research problem, not least because scientists don’t yet have a solid grip on why humans and other animals are sentient. But at the summit, a niche cadre of philosophers, largely funded by the effective altruism movement, and a handful of freewheeling academics grappled with the question. Some presented their research on using LLMs to evaluate whether other LLMs might be sentient. On Debate Night, attendees argued about whether we should ironically call sentient AI systems “clankers,” a derogatory term for robots from the film Star Wars, asking if the robot slur could shape how we treat a new kind of mind.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a cow or a pig or an AI, as long as they have the capacity to feel happiness or suffering,” says Li.
In some ways, bringing AI sentience into an animal welfare conference isn’t as strange a move as it might seem. Researchers who work on machine sentience often draw on theories and approaches pioneered in the study of animal sentience, and if you accept that invertebrates likely feel pain and believe that AI systems might soon achieve superhuman intelligence, entertaining the possibility that those systems might also suffer may not be much of a leap.
“Animal welfare advocates are used to going against the grain,” says Derek Shiller, an AI consciousness researcher at the think tank Rethink Priorities, who was once a web developer at the animal advocacy nonprofit Humane League. “They’re more open to being concerned about AI welfare, even though other people think it’s silly.”
But outside the niche Bay Area circle, caring about the possibility of AI sentience is a harder sell. Li says she faced pushback from other animal welfare advocates when, inspired by a conference on AI sentience she attended in 2023, she rebranded her farm animal welfare advocacy organization as Sentient Futures last year. “Many people were extremely confident that AIs would never become sentient and [argued that] by investing any energy or money into AI welfare, we’re just burning money and throwing it away,” she says.
Matt Dominguez, executive director of Compassion in World Farming, echoed the concern. “I would hate to see people pulling money out of farm animal welfare or animal welfare and moving it into something that is hypothetical at this particular moment,” he says.
Still, Dominguez, who started partnering with the Shrimp Welfare Project after learning about invertebrate suffering, believes compassion is expansive. “When we get someone to care about one of those things, it creates capacity for their circle of compassion to grow to include others,” he says.
