Musk’s response to Anthropic AI possibly gaining consciousness.

Elon Musk had a two-word retort for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei after he said his company’s artificial intelligence models may have gained consciousness.

The tech mogul issued a sharp comeback to a post on X by cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket, which read: “Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.”

In response, Musk wrote, “He’s projecting.”

The post from Polymarket came after Amodei said he didn’t know if the company, which makes the popular Claude chatbot, has created AI models that are conscious.

“We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don’t know if the models are conscious,” Amodei said during an interview with The New York Times.

“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,” he continued.

Amodei explained: “We’re putting a lot of work into this field called interpretability, which is looking inside the brains of the models to try to understand what they’re thinking.”

“And you find things that are evocative, where there are activations that light up in the models that we see as being associated with the concept of anxiety or something like that. When characters experience anxiety in the text, and then when the model itself is in a situation that a human might associate with anxiety, that same anxiety neuron shows up,” he said.

Amodei’s stunning admission to the Times comes amid a clash between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over the use of AI within the military.

Amodei previously said his company denied a Pentagon request to remove safeguards on domestic surveillance and on fully autonomous weapons.

Amodei told the New York Times in an interview that his company’s AI has started showing symptoms of anxiety. The Associated Press.

President Donald Trump and administration officials deemed the company a “supply chain risk” – a term previously reserved for foreign adversaries – last week. The move came after Amodei refused to back down over concerns that the company’s products could be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

Anthropic has previously vowed to sue if the Pentagon pursued what it described as a “legally unsound” action, never before publicly applied to an American company.”

While the AI company lost major partnerships with defense contractors, Anthropic saw a surge in consumer downloads over the past week as people sided with its moral stance.

Anthropic has boasted of more than a million people signing up for Claude each day this week, lifting it past OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini as the top AI app in more than 20 countries in Apple's App Store.

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