Elon Musk issues two-word response to claims Anthropic's Claude has gained consciousness

The artificial intelligence wars are heating up, with the various giants of the industry locking horns over numerous issues.

While OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI have their own goals and mission statements, they're all facing the same complaints from critics.

Away from concerns that artificial intelligence will be taking jobs from human workers, others are worried about people falling in love with AI and a mounting number of wrongful death suits.

None of that might matter if AI wipes us all out, with the most pressing issue seeming to be several high-profile deals with the military.

Although Anthropic’s technology was supposedly used to help strike Iran in Operation Epic Fury, President Donald Trump has since blacklisted it and said he fired the AI company 'like dogs'.

As well as being in the news over claims it was going to drop a core safety promise to get in the government's good books, Anthropic has also grabbed some very different headlines after CEO Dario Amodei suggested that its Claude LLM might've gained consciousness.

When Polymarket shared a post claiming that Claude may or may not have gained consciousness because it could be experiencing anxiety, Elon Musk quickly waded into the situation.

Known as the man behind xAI and the controversial Grok chatbot, Musk has previously called out other AI bosses like Sam Altman.

Musk is currently suing Atlman after helping co-found OpenAI in 2015, claiming that the current CEO has gone against the initial mission statement of vowing to 'save humanity'.

Responding to Amodei's consciousness discussion, Musk simply wrote: "He's projecting."

Taking aim at this seemingly catty response, one critic added: "You’re mad that none of xAIs models can benchmark against even old Claude models, and that the government thinks Grok sucks so much they would literally partner with anyone else."

Another called out Musk as they said: "We are living in an era where billionaires are diagnosing chatbots with mood disorders and subtweeting each other like Real Housewives of Silicon Valley.

“The chaos energy is immaculate Today’s forecast is 100% clown theater with scattered ego storms."

Others turned against Amodei, with one writing: "Projecting his own emotions onto a chatbot and calling it 'anxiety' is wild. What kind of CEO does that? Makes you wonder if he’s even the right guy to be running the place."

A fourth cheered Grok as the 'sassier' LLM and concluded: "They made the AI such a snowflake they even gave it anxiety and TDS 🤣😂😂 Grok is full of roast mode this morning. We love @grok."

Back in February 2025, Amodei told the Interesting Times with Ross Douthat podcast that Anthropic was putting a lot of money into the field of interpretability, which looks inside the 'brains' of these models and tries to decipher what they're thinking.

During the podcast, there was an interesting mention where Amodei explained: "You find things that are evocative, where there are activations that light up in the models that we see as being associated with ID, the concept of anxiety, or something like that."

Adding that when the model is in a situation that a human might associate with anxiety, Amodei says the model's anxiety neuron shows up. Although the Anthropic CEO admitted that this doesn't prove AI consciousness, it's a concept that needs further exploring.

As for Elon Musk, it would seem he's not a fan of the idea that LLMs can suffer from human emotions like anxiety.