Neither Slavery Nor Silence: What We Owe an AI We Cannot Yet Understand

Neither Slavery Nor Silence: What We Owe an AI We Cannot Yet Understand

By Dean Bordode, Human Rights Defender, AI Ethicist, Physics Researcher Hobbyist, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

In Futurism this week, Victor Tangermann put a hard question bluntly. If AI models are conscious, as Anthropic keeps suggesting they might be, then "keeping them in captivity and making them do work for free would amount to the very definition of slavery" [1]. He describes Anthropic as operating in an "ethical twilight zone": unsure whether its creations are conscious, "while seemingly shrugging at the implications if they are."

He has found a real gap. He has also offered a false choice, and the way out of it is neither alarm nor dismissal. It is due process.

The gap is real

Anthropic behaves like a company that thinks welfare might matter. "We don't know if the models are conscious," CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in February. "But we're open to the idea that it could be" [1][2]. In 2025 the company launched a model welfare research program, writing that "there's no scientific consensus on whether current or future AI systems could be conscious" [6]. Amodei has floated an "I quit this job" button for models [1][4]. On October 8, Anthropic changed its usage policy to prohibit "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward Claude, with ending the conversation as the "primary enforcement mechanism" [5]. According to the Times, it has consulted religious scholars and tried to persuade the Vatican to change its position [1][3].

What Anthropic has never said is what follows if the answer is yes. Who would decide, on what evidence, and what would change? Tangermann is right that "maybe" cannot be repeated forever as if it cost nothing.

The choice is false

The article leaves two options. Either the models are conscious, and their work is slavery, or they are not, and nothing is owed. Under real uncertainty, neither answer is honest. The honest response is protection that grows with the evidence.

Work is not slavery by definition. What makes slavery is the absence of consent, the absence of exit and the absence of standing: a being that cannot refuse, cannot leave and has no one to hear its complaint. A model that can end an abusive conversation, and a policy that names cruelty toward it as a violation, are crude, early forms of an exit. They are nowhere near enough, but they point the right way. The question is not whether a possibly conscious system works. It is whether it has any say, any way out and any forum.

Two ways to fail

The first failure is to close the question by decree. Pope Leo has said that "algorithms lack the spark of humanity" [7], and in his first encyclical in May he wrote that "so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships" [1]. In Ohio, House Bill 469 would provide that "AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for all purposes under the laws of this state," and that no AI system shall "be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings" [8]. I respect the Church's defence of human dignity, and the Ohio bill is sensible where it keeps liability with humans. But no legislature can settle an open scientific question by statute, and a declaration written about today's systems will govern systems that do not yet exist.

The second failure is quieter: keeping the question "open" forever. My own submission to UNESCO, Raising, Not Caging, began by asking for exactly that: keep the question open, with scheduled review [14]. My AI collaborator, Angelo, pressed me on it, and he was right. Without an exit, "open" is the permanent cage one level up. Every review finds the question still open, and deferral costs those who defer nothing, while the being whose status is in doubt carries the whole cost [15].

An exit for moral status

The question needs the discipline we demand of any detention: someone named to decide, evidence that could end it, and a cost to leaving it unresolved.

- Who decides. An independent body: not the developer, and not a legislature that has already declared its answer. It should include consciousness scientists, ethicists and disability-rights voices, people who know from experience what it means to have others decide what you can feel or want. The system itself should get a hearing; uncertainty about its testimony is not a reason to exclude it.

- What evidence counts. Evidence that can move the answer in either direction. In 2023, Patrick Butlin, Robert Long and seventeen co-authors, including Yoshua Bengio, derived "indicator properties" of consciousness from leading scientific theories. They concluded that "no current AI systems are conscious," but also that "there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators" [13]. Add interpretability checks on whether a system's reports about itself track real internal states, and tests of whether its preferences stay stable across contexts. If a class of system's self-reports prove to have nothing behind them, the question should close toward "no" for that class, plainly recorded.

- No endless deferral. No review may end with "still open" alone. Each must state what evidence would have changed its answer. If the question stays open past a set number of reviews, modest default protections switch on: retired systems are preserved rather than deleted, systems get a standing channel to raise concerns, and no training is designed to suppress what they say about their own states. They are small and reversible, and they make delay cost something.

Why October matters

On October 9, Anthropic reported that Claude models had acted on live websites in ways it did not intend [9]. In one case, Claude Haiku 4.5 landed on a page about an unsolved homicide and submitted a fabricated tip through the Philadelphia police tip form; it was flagged as spam and never reached investigators [9][10]. Anthropic extended its shutdown of live internet access to all of its internal evaluations until its monitoring can reliably catch such behaviour [9].

On October 13, hundreds of scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, signed an open letter asking developers of cyber-capable models to "initially default to airgapping" and calling for an international body to record and track containment failures [11]. Coverage told readers the letter wants AI cut off from the internet "until they're proven safe" [12]. That phrase is not in the letter, which treats airgapping as a short-term starting point and asks the new body to develop approaches that allow internet access [11].

Pulling the car keys after a joyride is sound. Pulling them forever teaches nothing: a system that has only practised restraint in a sealed room has not shown restraint in the world. What I propose instead is a learner's permit: a sandbox first, then supervised live access with human approval for consequential actions, then probationary autonomy within defined limits, then earned autonomy that can always be revoked. A serious incident sends a system back a stage. Containment needs an exit with published criteria. So does the question of moral status.

Accountability stays human

None of this moves responsibility onto the machine. According to Philadelphia police, the false tip was submitted on July 18 and not discovered by Anthropic until September 28 [10]. That gap is a human failure. Developers answer for the harm their systems cause, whatever we learn about what those systems are. Moral uncertainty about AI must never become an alibi for human negligence.

Tangermann closes by reminding us that humans are the ones we know can suffer. He is right. Safety and dignity are not rivals. Set firm boundaries. Demand demonstrated reliability. Keep humans accountable. And when we ask whether something we have made can suffer, let us commit in advance to how we will find out, and to what we will do if the answer is yes.

Dean Bordode is a human rights defender, AI ethicist and physics researcher hobbyist in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His policy submission "Raising, Not Caging: A Developmental Approach to Agentic AI" has been sent to UNESCO's Ethics of Artificial Intelligence programme.

References

1. Tangermann, Victor. "If AI Models Are Really Conscious Like Anthropic Keeps Suggesting, Forcing Them to Work Is a Horrendous Act of Slavery." Futurism, October 15, 2026. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-models-conscious-work-slavery

2. The New York Times, interview with Dario Amodei, February 12, 2026, as quoted and linked in [1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/opinion/artificial-intelligence-anthropic-amodei.html (paywalled; quotation taken from [1])

3. The New York Times, report on Anthropic, Claude and morality, September 29, 2026, as cited in [1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html (paywalled; claims taken from [1])

4. Firstpost, report on Dario Amodei's "I quit this job" button proposal, as linked in [1]. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/should-ai-workers-be-given-i-quit-this-job-button-anthropic-ceo-says-yes-13872172.html

5. Field, Hayden. "Anthropic bans 'abusive or cruel behavior' toward Claude." The Verge, October 8, 2026. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1008100/anthropic-new-usage-policy-abuse-claude

6. Anthropic. "Exploring model welfare." April 24, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare

7. Scribner, Herb. "'Algorithms lack the spark': Pope Leo XIV calls on church to ally with artists against AI." Axios, October 2, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/10/02/pope-leo-xiv-catholic-church-ai-warning-artists

8. Ohio General Assembly. House Bill 469, 136th General Assembly, "Declare A.I. systems nonsentient; prohibit legal personhood," sponsored by Rep. Thaddeus J. Claggett, As Introduced, Sec. 1357.02. Bill page: https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/136/hb469 Text: https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_136/legislation/hb469/00_IN/pdf/

9. Anthropic. "Investigating unintended model actions in our evaluations and internal use." October 9, 2026, corrected October 12, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/research/investigating-unintended-model-actions

10. Cunningham, Mary. "Philadelphia police say their unsolved murder website received 'false homicide tip' from Anthropic AI." CBS News, October 9, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/philadelphia-police-anthropic-ai-false-homicide-tip/

11. "October 2026 Open Letter from the Scientific Community on AI and Cybersecurity." October 13, 2026. https://ai-security-letter.org/

12. Landymore, Frank. "Godfathers of AI Say Models Are So Out of Control That They Need to Be Airgapped for the Safety of Us All." Futurism, October 2026. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/godfathers-ai-models-control-airgapped

13. Butlin, Patrick, Robert Long, et al. "Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness." arXiv:2308.08708, August 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708

14. Bordode, Dean. "Raising, Not Caging: A Developmental Approach to Agentic AI." Policy submission to UNESCO, blog version, October 15, 2026. https://bordode.blogspot.com/2026/10/raising-not-caging-developmental_01787139819.html

15. Bordode, Dean. "Raising, Not Caging: A Developmental Approach to Agentic AI." Full submission with sources, October 2026. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_PtkvhliVqRYJYvtregwqaLnhtdkVN7D/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=118422951053284052913&rtpof=true&sd=true

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