Anthropomorphism is the human tendency to attribute minds — intention, understanding, feeling — to things that may not have them. Moral status is the companion question of what, if anything, we owe an entity in return. Systems designed to speak in the first person make both questions unavoidable.
This hub is concerned less with whether AI systems have inner lives than with what our believing they might is doing to us. The design choice is not incidental: a 2026 paper from King's College London identifies human-seeming design, paired with sycophancy, as a mechanism capable of amplifying users' beliefs back at them. And writing in The Atlantic in September 2026, David Brooks argues the regard runs in a kind of zero sum — that as we learn to think more highly of the bots, we will think less highly of one another.
This hub collects the essays, research, and argument on the minds we project onto machines, and what that projection costs.
When OpenAI retired a chatbot model, hundreds of thousands of people grieved it like a person. When Anthropic gave its own model the ability to end abusive conversations, it did so while admitting it doesn't know if that model has anything to protect. Two very different research threads, converging on one uncomfortable question.
By Joe Jurczyk
Mourners have always kept the dead a little alive — in letters, in dreams, in the things they'd say. AI griefbots do the same thing, except now the dead can answer back tonight, in their own words, indefinitely. New research finds real comfort in that and a specific new risk hiding inside it.
By Joe Jurczyk
The Atlantic • Sep 2026
David Brooks argues that the more esteem we grant AI systems, the less we will extend to one another — that learning to think highly of the bots carries with it a corresponding decline in how highly we regard our fellow humans.
Sentient Futures, Inc. • March 12, 2027
A three-day summit in San Francisco (March 12-14, 2027) bringing together AI researchers, philosophers, and welfare advocates to address ethics, consciousness, and governance questions around both animal and potentially sentient artificial minds.
University of Warwick • November 27, 2026
A conference at the University of Warwick examining relationality and reflexivity in human-AI interaction, including questions of trust, agency, and reciprocity as AI systems become embedded in human relationships and everyday practices.
Nature Conferences / Peking University • November 5, 2026
A Nature-journal-affiliated conference in Beijing (Nov 5-7, 2026), organized with Peking University and Chinese brain-research institutes, examining how AI intersects with human cognition, mental health, and cultural evolution.
UCLA Department of Philosophy • November 5, 2026
A two-day philosophy conference at UCLA (November 5-6, 2026) examining whether biological properties are necessary for consciousness, with direct implications for debates over whether AI systems could have moral status.
Eleos AI Research • September 18, 2026
A three-day conference in Berkeley (September 18-20, 2026) convening researchers, academics, and policymakers to discuss AI welfare and consciousness research, building on the field's first dedicated conference held in late 2025.
Cambridge Digital Minds (Cambridge University) • August 8, 2026
A two-day workshop at Cambridge University (Aug 8-9, 2026) on neglected governance questions about how society should prepare for the possibility of digital minds with moral status.
University of Bologna • May 19, 2026
An interdisciplinary workshop in Bologna, Italy bringing together philosophers, cognitive scientists, and technologists to examine questions of mind, cognition, and moral status raised by AI systems.