AI RESEARCH

The Consciousness Cluster: Emergent preferences of Models that Claim to be Conscious

arXiv CS.LG

ArXi:2604.13051v1 Announce Type: cross There is debate about whether LLMs can be conscious. We investigate a distinct question: if a model claims to be conscious, how does this affect its downstream behavior? This question is already practical. Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 claims that it may be conscious and may have some form of emotions. We fine-tune GPT-4.1, which initially denies being conscious, to claim to be conscious. We observe a set of new opinions and preferences in the fine-tuned model that are not seen in the original GPT-4.1 or in ablations.