Written by: Editorial3 min readSep 7, 2026 07:08 PM IST First published on: Sep 7, 2026 at 07:08 PM ISTThe machine is intelligent, but is it also conscious? This is the question sparked by the revelation that the AI chatbot Claude Sonnet 4.5 may have something like an internal thought process — a team of researchers found that upon being prompted, the model’s internal layers throw up words connected to the eventual output that remain invisible to the user. Anthropic, which has developed Claude, calls this “small collection of internal neural patterns” the “J-space” and has argued that it is comparable to the “workspace” of the human brain — a network of neurons that gathers, integrates and transmits information from different parts of the brain to the rest of the nervous system, making conscious thought possible.For many, this development gestures to the startling possibility that machines with consciousness may no longer just be the stuff of science fiction. The argument put forth by, among others, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is that the closer the technology gets to mimicking the actual workings of the human brain, the higher the possibility of conscious AI. The ongoing efforts to develop “biological” or “bio-hybrid” computers — where human neurons are mounted on silicon — only brings this eventuality closer. Yet, how the “consciousness” of AI is understood depends also on how consciousness itself is understood. Nearly half a century of research on the subject has yielded over 300 frameworks and theories, one of which is the global workspace theory being used to make the case for Claude’s consciousness. Moreover, as neuroscientist Anil K Seth has argued, assertions about the possibility of “conscious” AI are often made based on evidence of its intelligence and the two are very different.AdvertisementAlso Read | What AI doesn’t tell you: Your stories matterConsciousness, which comes down to subjective experience — the thrill of seeing a double rainbow or the angst of being misunderstood by one’s parents — would radically change the stakes. AI that is conscious would mean AI that experiences everything that a human does, including hate, jealousy and suffering, transforming it from mere machine into something with a moral underpinning. As more sophisticated models are developed and the frontiers of the technology are pushed into uncharted terrain, the hard task of responding to the questions they raise — including the ethics of consciously developing something that is itself conscious — can no longer be put off.