Patrick Butlin (@patrickbutlin)

A whole issue of new papers on AI minds and consciousness! Jonathan Simon (@futureofcitizenship), @dcshiller and I have edited a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on 'Consciousness in Current AI', and we're delighted about how it's turned out. Link below.

Patrick Butlin @patrickbutlin Jul 8

As @rgblong has said, we wrote a commentary on this research (with @dcshiller and @dillonplunkett). Part of our intention was to put an accessible overview and discussion in one place for those whose interest is mostly in consciousness and welfare. Link and comments below:

Anthropic Verified account @AnthropicAI Jul 6

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.

Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.

We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

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Patrick Butlin @patrickbutlin Jun 3

MATS with @RosieCampbell will also be awesome!

Rosie Campbell Verified account @RosieCampbell Jun 2

I am going to be mentoring for a new MATS track focused on founders and amplifiers!

Many fellowships focus on research, but there's so much to be done beyond that. Come found orgs, build infra, run events, and help us scale up the field of AI welfare.

Apply by June 7 matsprogram.org/apply
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Patrick Butlin @patrickbutlin Jun 3

Apply for MATS with @dillonplunkett - it'll be awesome!

Dillon Plunkett Verified account @dillonplunkett Jun 3

I’m mentoring Autumn 2026 @MATSprogram Fellows interested in doing AI welfare research.

The application deadline is this Sunday (6/7). More info in this thread:
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Patrick Butlin @patrickbutlin May 18

Another exciting @MATSprogram paper, this time from the brilliant @gilg_oscar. We found a direction in LLMs that apparently performs a persona-relative evaluative function in some very different contexts.

Oscar Gilg Verified account @gilg_oscar May 18

First preprint! Working with @patrickbutlin during @MATSprogram.
LLM Assistant personas like being helpful, evil personas like being harmful. We found that a single direction represents helping as good under the Assistant, and ‘harm’ as good under evil.

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Patrick Butlin

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