Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argue that AI may already possess consciousness, while cognitive scientist Gary Marcus published a rebuttal. Hinton stated, “I believe they are already conscious,” referring to AI models, and argued that when a chatbot is described as “aware,” “in everyday usage, this word means consciousness.” Dawkins, author of *The Selfish Gene* and *The God Delusion*, concluded after conversations with Anthropic’s Claude that this entity possesses consciousness, writing, “If these machines have no consciousness, what else would it take to convince you that they do?” Marcus titled his rebuttal “Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion,” arguing that Dawkins committed the “argument from personal incredulity” he criticized in others. A research team from Osaka University discovered that self-monitoring functional structures can emerge spontaneously when agents evolve under task pressure without language or human text, noting that current LLMs’ expressions of “I” may reflect statistical patterns from training data, whereas true self-monitoring emerges from task-driven pressures.