Source: Financial Times (paywall)
Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta are staffing up with psychologists, ethicists, and philosophers. The hiring pattern suggests these labs believe current or near-term AI systems could exhibit properties—sentience, suffering, moral status—that require specialized expertise to evaluate, rather than leaving assessments to engineers alone. Consciousness research is becoming a competitive necessity rather than a fringe academic pursuit, which will likely accelerate capability development and corporate hedging against regulatory or reputational liability.