Robots & Artificial IntelligenceAnthropic Thinks Its AI Might Be Anxious — The Pentagon Has Bigger Problems With It Than That Posted on March 25, 2026 by Administrator Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, sat down with The New York Times recently and said something that would have sounded like science fiction just a few years ago — and still probably should. His company, he explained, isn’t entirely sure whether Claude, its flagship AI model, is conscious. More than that, internal researchers have identified what they’re calling “anxiety neurons” — patterns of activation inside the model that appear to correspond to anxious states, lighting up both when characters in a text experience anxiety and when the model itself is placed in situations a human might find stressful.
