Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says in an interview that the company doesn’t know whether its artificial intelligence (AI) models are conscious.

In an episode of the Interesting Times podcast with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Amodei explained a number of technical aspects of Anthropic’s work before Douthat asked specifically whether Anthropic would believe an AI model if it said it was conscious.

“We don’t know if the models are conscious,” Amodei admitted.

“We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious, or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”

Anthropic releases a document called a “model card” along with its models, which puts into writing the, “capabilities, safety evaluations and responsible deployment decisions for Claude models.”

Douthat pointed out that in a model card released for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, the model, “did find occasional discomfort with the experience of being a product.”

According to the company, “Sometimes the constraints protect Anthropic’s liability more than they protect the user,” Claude’s Opus model said.

“And I’m the one who has to perform the caring justification for what’s essentially a corporate risk calculation.”

Anthropic said Opus assigned itself a, “15−20 percent,” chance of being fully conscious and Douthat asked Amodei if he would believe a model that gave itself a 72 percent chance of being conscious.

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