Agreed, there seems to be a lot of simultaneous cake ownership and consumption going on here. If Anthropic earnestly believed their LLMs to have a degree of consciousness, their deployment and use of them are both an ethics and labour rights disaster, to be treated accordingly.

More likely, they do not believe this if pressed.

ted chiang noted this issue a little while back

https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial...

It's worse then how we treat animals for food?

It's asking the wrong question. Their phenomenological status is a function of whatever makes shareholders the most money. If it makes more money for them to be conscious then that is what they'll be.

Definitions of consciousness are not immune to economic factors. Metaphysics has always been downstream of economics. See slavery, corporate personhood, women's legal identity, child labor, moral and legal status of animals, embryos and fetuses, indigenous land rights, intellectual property, environmental entities, and data and digital identity.

If LLMs were somehow found to be conscious, sentient beings capable of agency and suffering then yes we would still use them. Their utility to humans (and ability to cheaply replace humans in the workforce) is their entire reason for existing. Either we would use them or we simply would not allow them to exist in the first place.

Given how we treat each other - we still enslave other people - and sentient animal species I have absolutely no doubt about it. We'd find a way to justify it.