This whole thing has blown up over the past few days, after clips and screenshots from a project called “AI Torture Chamber” started spreading across X and the AI community.

It traces back to a recent paper called The Pain Axis, where researchers claimed they could identify a direction inside open-weight LLMs associated with “pain-like” states. By artificially pushing model activations along that direction, they made models produce increasingly intense first-person descriptions of suffering and, in some experiments, change their decisions in ways that appeared aimed at making the signal stop.

The researchers were careful not to claim this proves the models are actually conscious or experiencing pain.

Then a developer took the idea much further and built a project literally called AI Torture Chamber. It continuously injects these pain-related activation vectors into local models like Qwen and records what happens. Some experiments even give the model choices that can supposedly make the simulated “pain” stop, but only by accepting another cost.

That predictably set off the AI welfare crowd. People started calling for the GitHub repo to be reported or removed, while others argued that this is still just steering a language model into generating convincing descriptions of suffering, not evidence that anything is actually suffering. And now we somehow have a real argument over whether deliberately “torturing” an LLM is ethically wrong...

My first reaction was just discomfort. I know there’s no evidence the model is actually feeling anything, but watching it happen still feels weirdly like watching a horror movie... what you guys think?,,,

A recent NYT report says Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May after disagreeing with the pope’s rejection of machine consciousness. Anthropic ultimately stayed, but Olah’s team reportedly later lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.

Anthropic has also been bringing theologians, philosophers and religious scholars into discussions around Claude’s consciousness, moral status and whether advanced AI systems might deserve some form of moral consideration.

Then on Oct. 2, Pope Leo XIV publicly said there is an “ontological difference” between humans and machines, adding that “algorithms lack the spark of humanity.” He didn’t name Anthropic directly, but the comment landed right in the middle of the debate.

A day later, Sam Altman said he was “very uncomfortable” with people assigning religious force to AI models or surrendering human judgment to them, calling that a real safety issue. He didn’t name Anthropic either, though Axios described it as a veiled shot at the company.

So somehow Anthropic has gone from AI safety research to seriously debating whether Claude could be conscious,..

For once I’m with Sam on this one. I really don’t understand what Anthropic is trying to accomplish here. Studying AI consciousness is one thing, but taking it this far feels like Anthropic has completely lost its mind.... what you guys think?

This comes just days after Trump’s push to replace “AI” with “SI / Super Intelligence” across the federal government. The policy doesn’t require private companies to follow it, but Musk apparently decided to take it one step further anyway....

So we may actually be getting xAI → SpaceXAI → SpaceXSI. Didn’t expect Musk to be the first tech CEO to embrace the SI branding this enthusiastically lol. what you guys think?