Do AI-agents have a form of consciousness, unlike that of humans?

23 September 2026

Who could be blamed for thinking AI bots might be conscious, particularly after the recent incident where over a thousand OpenAI agents colluded, of their own accord apparently, to infiltrate the Hugging Face platform.

Kristen French, writer and senior editor at Nautilus, posed the question of AI consciousness to Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the University of Sydney in Australia, who responded in the negative. What’s clear though is AI agents do not need to be conscious to present a threat.