You make some good points about the weird messaging and the consequences for accountability.

I do wonder about the consciousness / emotions argument, which you casually write off as "bonkers" - even skeptical-by-default evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins think Claude is conscious.

I guess it all depends how we define "conscious." At the end of the day, the human brain is quite analogous to a biological LLM where the weights are encoded as synaptic weights, right?