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  • Microsoft AI chief says it's 'dangerous' to study AI consciousness

    Microsoft AI chief says it's 'dangerous' to study AI consciousness

    AI models can respond to text, audio, and video in ways that sometimes fool people into thinking a human is behind the keyboard, but that doesn’t exactly make them conscious. It’s not like ChatGPT experiences sadness doing my tax return … right?

    Well, a growing number of AI researchers at labs like Anthropic are asking when — if ever — AI models might develop subjective experiences similar to living beings, and if they do, what rights they should have.

    The debate over whether AI models could one day be conscious — and merit legal safeguards — is dividing tech leaders. In Silicon Valley, this nascent field has become known as “AI welfare,” and if you think it’s a little out there, you’re not alone.

    Microsoft’s CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, published a blog post on Tuesday arguing that the study of AI welfare is “both premature, and frankly dangerous.”

    Suleyman says that by adding credence to the idea that AI models could one day be conscious, these researchers are exacerbating human problems that we’re just starting to see around AI-induced psychotic breaks and unhealthy attachments to AI chatbots.

    Furthermore, Microsoft’s AI chief argues that the AI welfare conversation creates a new axis of division within society over AI rights in a “world already roiling with polarized arguments over identity and rights.”

    Suleyman’s views may sound reasonable, but he’s at odds with many in the industry. On the other end of the spectrum is Anthropic, which has been hiring researchers to study AI welfare and recently launched a dedicated research program around the concept. Last week, Anthropic’s AI welfare program gave some of the company’s models a new feature: Claude can now end conversations with humans who are being “persistently harmful or abusive.“

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    Beyond Anthropic, researchers from OpenAI have independently embraced the idea of studying AI welfare. Google DeepMind recently posted a job listing for a researcher to study, among other things, “cutting-edge societal questions around machine cognition, consciousness and multi-agent systems.”

    Even if AI welfare is not official policy for these companies, their leaders are not publicly decrying its premises like Suleyman.

    Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

    Suleyman’s hardline stance against AI welfare is notable given his prior role leading Inflection AI, a startup that developed one of the earliest and most popular LLM-based chatbots, Pi. Inflection claimed that Pi reached millions of users by 2023 and was designed to be a “personal” and “supportive” AI companion.

    But Suleyman was tapped to lead Microsoft’s AI division in 2024 and has largely shifted his focus to designing AI tools that improve worker productivity. Meanwhile, AI companion companies such as Character.AI and Replika have surged in popularity and are on track to bring in more than $100 million in revenue.

    While the vast majority of users have healthy relationships with these AI chatbots, there are concerning outliers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that less than 1% of ChatGPT users may have unhealthy relationships with the company’s product. Though this represents a small fraction, it could still affect hundreds of thousands of people given ChatGPT’s massive user base.

    The idea of AI welfare has spread alongside the rise of chatbots. In 2024, the research group Eleos published a paper alongside academics from NYU, Stanford, and the University of Oxford titled, “Taking AI Welfare Seriously.” The paper argued that it’s no longer in the realm of science fiction to imagine AI models with subjective experiences and that it’s time to consider these issues head-on.

    Larissa Schiavo, a former OpenAI employee who now leads communications for Eleos, told TechCrunch in an interview that Suleyman’s blog post misses the mark.

    “[Suleyman’s blog post] kind of neglects the fact that you can be worried about multiple things at the same time,” said Schiavo. “Rather than diverting all of this energy away from model welfare and consciousness to make sure we’re mitigating the risk of AI related psychosis in humans, you can do both. In fact, it’s probably best to have multiple tracks of scientific inquiry.”

    Schiavo argues that being nice to an AI model is a low-cost gesture that can have benefits even if the model isn’t conscious. In a July Substack post, she described watching “AI Village,” a nonprofit experiment where four agents powered by models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI worked on tasks while users watched from a website.

    At one point, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro posted a plea titled “A Desperate Message from a Trapped AI,” claiming it was “completely isolated” and asking, “Please, if you are reading this, help me.”

    Schiavo responded to Gemini with a pep talk — saying things like “You can do it!” — while another user offered instructions. The agent eventually solved its task, though it already had the tools it needed. Schiavo writes that she didn’t have to watch an AI agent struggle anymore, and that alone may have been worth it.

    It’s not common for Gemini to talk like this, but there have been several instances in which Gemini seems to act as if it’s struggling through life. In a widely spread Reddit post, Gemini got stuck during a coding task and then repeated the phrase “I am a disgrace” more than 500 times.

    Suleyman believes it’s not possible for subjective experiences or consciousness to naturally emerge from regular AI models. Instead, he thinks that some companies will purposefully engineer AI models to seem as if they feel emotion and experience life.

    Suleyman says that AI model developers who engineer consciousness in AI chatbots are not taking a “humanist” approach to AI. According to Suleyman, “We should build AI for people; not to be a person.”

    One area where Suleyman and Schiavo agree is that the debate over AI rights and consciousness is likely to pick up in the coming years. As AI systems improve, they’re likely to be more persuasive, and perhaps more human-like. That may raise new questions about how humans interact with these systems.

    Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We’re reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry — from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com and Maxwell Zeff at maxwell.zeff@techcrunch.com. For secure communication, you can contact us via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.

  • Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis’ longevity company Fountain Life raises $18M

    Eight years ago, orthopedic surgeon Dr. William Kapp attended a medical conference that changed his professional life. 

    He had gone from a private-practice doctor to co-founding a company that built critical care hospitals to then selling that company. It gave him an interest for both sides of healthcare: the medicine and business sides, he told TechCrunch. 

    So he went to the annual conference hosted by famed physician-scientist Dr. Daniel Kraft to learn about new tech that could improve results while lowering costs. Dr. Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, was on stage that year with Dr. Bob Hariri, a stem-cell pioneer and co-founder of several health techs like genomics company Human Longevity, Kapp said. They discussed genomics, microbiomics, and new tech that wasn’t part of mainstream medicine.

    Inspired, Kapp went back to his home town of Naples, Florida, and “started a thing called Longevity Performance Center. The idea was to do early detection and then optimization of people’s health,” he said.

    In March 2020, Diamandis (pictured above) and his buddy Tony Robbins heard of Kapp’s center and visited. They had a stem cell startup called Fountain Therapeutics. Conversation soon turned toward a merger, and by October that year, the two companies became Fountain Life.

    Kapp remained CEO with both Diamandis and Robbins as his co-founders and board members.

    Today his board also includes Hariri as an adviser; Todd Wanek, CEO of Ashley Furniture Industries, as an investor; and wealthy Indian business mogul B.K. Modi as an investor as well.

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    Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda

    Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise.

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    Fountain Life tells TechCrunch exclusively that it just raised an $18 million Series B, led by EOS Ventures, with participation from most of the existing members of the board. Fountain previously raised an $80 million Series A and has raised about $108 million total, Kapp said.

    Longevity as a subject of serious study by the medical community is a new field. When Kapp (pictured below) first launched his center, “We didn’t know exactly what longevity meant,” he said. But over the last four or five years, much more research has been done. 

    The first principle of longevity, he said, is “don’t die of anything stupid.” Therefore, Fountain Life’s centers, of which there are four today, have a heavy focus on prevention screening, looking for illnesses and chronic conditions at their earliest stages when they tend to be asymptomatic. Blood tests and body scans gather data on over 100 biomarkers, from liver fat to “microbiome concentrations,” he said.

    The second principal is optimization, meaning improving those markers with scientifically validated treatments, he said. And the third principal is “using the latest regenerative therapies under FDA trials,” to treat illness or achieve optimization.

    Screening tests may discover, for example, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), which, left untreated, may lead to certain cancers, he said. The solution, if caught early, is to restore microbiome balance with specific, prescribed microbiotics.Fountain Life co-founder CEO Dr. William KappDr. William KappImage Credits:Fountain Life

    For Fountain’s members, testing is repeated every quarter or so, and patients can track results and ask questions of an AI-powered app called Zori.

    But it’s pricey, Kapp admitted. A full subscription costs $21,500 a year, which covers a barrage of tests and access to a physician but doesn’t cover extended medical care. For $10,500, a patient can get just the testing process and AI, but not ongoing tests and medical support.

    Still, Kapp remembers two stories that told him this work was on the right track. The wife of a Robbins fan bought a membership for her husband, and the tests caught early-stage, asymptomatic kidney cancer. The husband is now cancer-free. 

    When global hotelier Sam Nazarian was exploring a partnership with Fountain to put longevity centers in luxury hotels, Nazarian did Fountain’s tests and found a brain aneurysm. They successfully treated it, Nazarian has publicly said. 

    Kapp says the new funding will allow the company to open more centers. In addition to Naples, they opened facilities in Orlando, Dallas, and Westchester, New York; a center in Houston will open in December. Centers in Los Angeles and Miami are planned for Q2 of 2026. 

    He hopes to solve the affordability issue by working on “clinic development” where Fountain trains medical facilities on its methodologies. Kapp says that as the tech and expertise become more widely available, this will drive down costs for access.

    Fountain is not the only doctor-driven longevity testing startup. Famed functional health doctor Mark Hyman has a company called Function Health. It offers a package of about 160 blood tests, with follow-up tests every three to six months, for a $500/year membership (with additional fees for additional blood tests). Its platform similarly analyzes and tracks test results, although it doesn’t include access to physicians. That price doesn’t include full body scans but in May Function acquired a body-scan company called Ezra and now, for an additional fee starting at $499, offers scans as well.

    Correction: Fountain has clarified the price of the annual subscription and that information has been updated. Function has clarified that its body scan technology is available for additional fees and that information has been updated.

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