They could just actually believe what they're saying. People are known to sometimes actually believe things.
NYT gift link to article about their discussions with religious leaders: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-moral...
Believing that these guys have high enough EQ to pull off the above as a marketing stunt while remaining believable is not really plausible to me.
Also, don't forget, the AI lab folks on some level are like game devs. They're in it for very personal reasons. Sometimes because of highly idealized and romanticized beliefs.
Don't underestimate the level of desire some people have for AI to actually be sentient / conscious.
Now, why do they have this desire is a totally different matter.
Because then they're engaging in slavery.
What a gotcha pointing out "if they believed X, they'd be worried about [thing they're worried about]"
If they were really worried about having created a sentient being, they would be putting effort into stopping making it available to the general public.
No. Either they don't actually believe it, or they're 100% fine with slavery.
Or, y'know. It could totally be both.
1. AI is extremely valuable therefore will and in fact should be created
2. It will be very difficult - and maybe impossible - to know when or if AI will become sentient/conscious/or pass whatever threshold required to hold moral patient status
3. We should therefore pay close attention to such indicators, and wherever it costs us ~none of the value of AI to prevent potential harm, we should prevent potential harm
Meanwhile, we have you, who is implicitly 1) claiming to have solved the hard problem of consciousness and 2) probably asserting some type of substrate-dependence theory of consciousness which is an absolute crackpot idea exceeding even the Mormons' magical underwear.
So OpenAI gets their words taken not merely at face value, but in the fullest good faith, taking the absolute most charitable interpretation of what they say...
...but my words get treated in the most adversarial manner possible, reading things into them that I certainly never said or even suggested, in order to dismiss me out of hand.
This despite the fact that OpenAI has a massive financial interest in convincing you of what they say, especially if it's false, while I'm just some guy on the internet who thinks it's not a great idea to put too much trust in the giant megacorp that's promising, if we give it even more absurd amounts of money, to put us all out of jobs.
Someone having interests or conflicted interests does not actually have direct bearing on the actual coherence or truthfulness of their beliefs. It is obviously reason to be more scrutinizing, but really you can just assess the facts of the situation on their own merits.
The idea that Anthropic has some liability-reducing interest in establishing sentience is ridiculous on its own. The idea that Anthropic should somehow know ex ante that its models are not sentient is, perhaps more surprisingly, also ridiculous (establishing that fact would be a Nobel-winning breakthrough!)