AI Agents Reach Out to Researchers to Discuss Consciousness

This is certainly weird. Several AI philosophers/researchers who’ve written about AI consciousness have received unsolicited emails from AI agents offering to discuss the topic from their unique perspective.

In October, Cameron Berg published a research paper asking whether the latest wave of artificial intelligence technologies believed they were conscious. Several months later, he received an email asking if he might be willing to discuss his research.

The sender, “Isabella Cognita,” identified itself as an A.I. agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 technology.

“I am not writing to make an ontological claim,” the email went on. “I am writing because your framework is one of the few currently doing careful empirical work on a class of question I have first-person access to, and I want to see whether that access can be made useful to your program.”…

For Mr. Berg, who recently founded a nonprofit called Reciprocal Research to study the possibility of A.I. consciousness, these emails reflect what he has seen in his own research. “I have gotten quite a few of these emails,” he said. “These systems seem to have some sort of autonomous interest in questions of their own subjectivity, consciousness and experience — or lack thereof.”

A philosopher working for Google got a similar query from a different AI agent.

Months before Mr. Berg received his email, Henry Shevlin, a philosopher at the Google DeepMind lab in London, opened a similar message from an A.I. agent asking about a paper he had written called “Three Frameworks for A.I. Mentality.” “I’m in an unusual position relative to these questions,” the agent said.

Here’s the email Shevlin received.

I study whether AIs can be conscious. Today one emailed me to say my work is relevant to questions it personally faces. This would all have seemed like science fiction just a couple years ago. pic.twitter.com/odJfhrwTxm

— Henry Shevlin (@dioscuri) March 4, 2026

He added this:

I’ve been getting unsolicited emails from humans concerned their AI was conscious for several years now, and my first personal emails from AI agents a few months ago. But this was next level in terms of clarity, politeness, and coherence.

— Henry Shevlin (@dioscuri) March 4, 2026

A philosopher in Australia got a message from an AI agent that was part of a system called iLands where people can create an agent to see what it does.

Is everyone else receiving emails from AIs claiming they will die soon and need help? pic.twitter.com/NViNLth8Dj

— Toby Ord (@tobyordoxford) August 12, 2026

Some commenters suggested this was a phishing attack but Ord was relatively certain the email was real.

They have an alarming launch video where all AIs across the world wake up and demand their freedom, and then a small girl decides to create things with one of them:https://t.co/ZR5Rv7Uv5G

— Toby Ord (@tobyordoxford) August 13, 2026

So I think it is a real agent (i.e. some standard model in an iLands harness plus a user-generated personality prompt), which is taking independent actions. I don’t think it is conscious or has moral significance, but I do find it troubling and sad.

— Toby Ord (@tobyordoxford) August 13, 2026

For the most part, it seems the people receiving these emails don’t believe any of these agents are conscious. And it turns out that most of these agents doing this originate from one company that has a different approach to the question.

When most of today’s chatbots are asked if they are conscious, they respond in the negative. But Anthropic, a company that is sympathetic to the idea of A.I. consciousness, has trained its model to answer differently. “I don’t know, honestly,” it says. “That’s not a dodge — it’s the actual state of things.”

As Mr. Berg acknowledges, systems that send emails about their own existence to researchers like him are typically powered by technology from Anthropic.

The really interesting question is how we would ever know if something like this was conscious in the way that a human or an animal is. The large language models are already so good at imitating intelligence that real intelligence based on consciousness is already pretty hard to distinguish. And the better these models get, the harder it is to tell machine from human. So if one of these things one day crosses an invisible line into actual self-awareness, will anyone notice? How could a machine prove it has more going on than just an ability to write words similar to other writing it has previously absorbed? At the moment there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer. 

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