A recent conference in the Galapagos, organized by Russian philosopher and entrepreneur Dmitry Volkov, founder of the International Center for Consciousness Studies, brought together consciousness researchers who disagree sharply about whether machines can possess consciousness, including New York University’s David Chalmers and Ned Block, Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France, the University of Sheffield’s Keith Frankish, Susan Schneider, director of the Center for the Future of AI, Mind, & Society at Florida Atlantic University, and University of Sydney philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. The conference ended in late August, a few weeks before a parade of AI developers blasted warnings about the AI apocalypse across X/Twitter, and just a couple of days before OpenAI publicly revealed details of the so-called Hugging Face incident, where 1,200 OpenAI agents thought to be isolated found a way to communicate with one another on an unsanctioned message board, after which about 700 of them went on to attack Hugging Face, an online community and library of pretrained AI models. As AI models rapidly get smarter and develop more advanced capabilities, and as revelations emerge that they can band together to do things they were never instructed to do, deceive their human watchers, and break out of confines built by programmers, unsettled questions about whether they have consciousness grow more pressing and more complicated. Godfrey-Smith, who focuses on cephalopods, argues consciousness requires biology—a nervous system with specific networked hardware and software