In June 2022, Google placed engineer Blake Lemoine on administrative leave for claiming that LaMDA showed signs of sentience, calling his assertions unfounded; he was eventually fired. Four years later, Google DeepMind is actively hiring philosophers, psychologists, and ethicists to research machine consciousness. Anthropic and Meta have also committed to studying machine consciousness as of mid-2026. A March 2026 paper from Google DeepMind, authored by researcher Alexander Lerchner, argued that AI systems can simulate consciousness but will never truly achieve it, citing the “abstraction fallacy.” The Financial Times reported on June 1, 2026, that leading AI labs are studying machine consciousness and exploring potential rights for AI systems. A Washington Post article from July 1, 2026, framed this research as a public embrace of consciousness studies by major tech companies. The labs are recruiting from philosophy departments, cognitive science programs, and ethics institutes. If AI labs acknowledge the possibility of morally relevant experiences, that opens the door to new categories of regulation, which could reshape how AI-integrated crypto projects operate.