Narratives about artificial intelligence (AI) entangle autonomy, the capacity to self-govern, with sentience, the capacity to sense and feel. AI agents that perform tasks autonomously and companions that recognize and express emotions may activate mental models of autonomy and sentience, respectively, provoking distinct reactions. To examine this possibility, we conducted three pilot studies (N = 374) and four preregistered vignette experiments describing an AI as autonomous, sentient, both, or neither (N = 2,702). Activating a mental model of sentience increased general mind perception (cognition and emotion) and moral consideration more than autonomy, but autonomy increased perceived threat more than sentience. Sentience also increased perceived autonomy more than vice versa. Based on a within-paper meta-analysis, sentience changed reactions more than autonomy on average. By disentangling different mental models of AI, we can study human-AI interaction with more precision to better navigate the detailed design of anthropomorphized AI and prompting interfaces.

As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms society, developers and policymakers struggle to anticipate which applications will face public moral resistance. We propose that these judgments are not idiosyncratic but systematic and predictable. In a large, preregistered study (N = 587, U.S. representative sample), we used a comprehensive taxonomy of 100 AI applications spanning personal and organizational contexts-including both functional uses and the moral treatment of AI itself. In participants' collective judgment, applications ranged from highly unacceptable to fully acceptable. We found this variation was strongly predictable: five core moral qualities-perceived risk, benefit, dishonesty, unnaturalness, and reduced accountability-collectively explained over 90% of the variance in acceptability ratings. The framework demonstrated strong predictive power across all domains and successfully predicted individual-level judgments for held-out applications. These findings reveal that a structured moral psychology underlies public evaluation of new technologies, offering a powerful tool for anticipating public resistance and guiding responsible innovation in AI.

The conceptual framework proposed in this paper centers on the development of a deliberative moral reasoning system - one designed to process complex moral situations by generating, filtering, and weighing normative arguments drawn from diverse ethical perspectives. While the framework is rooted in Machine Ethics, it also makes a substantive contribution to Value Alignment by outlining a system architecture that links structured moral reasoning to action under time constraints. Grounded in normative moral pluralism, this system is not constructed to imitate behavior but is built on reason-sensitive deliberation over structured moral content in a transparent and principled manner. Beyond its role as a deliberative system, it also serves as the conceptual foundation for a novel two-level architecture: functioning as a moral reasoning teacher envisioned to train faster models that support real-time responsiveness without reproducing the full structure of deliberative reasoning. Together, the deliberative and intuitive components are designed to enable both deep reflection and responsive action. A key design feature is the dual-hybrid structure: a universal layer that defines a moral threshold through top-down and bottom-up learning, and a local layer that learns to weigh competing considerations in context while integrating culturally specific normative content, so long as it remains within the universal threshold. By extending the notion of moral complexity to include not only conflicting beliefs but also multifactorial dilemmas, multiple stakeholders, and the integration of non-moral considerations, the framework aims to support morally grounded decision-making in realistic, high-stakes contexts.

We surveyed 582 AI researchers who have published in leading AI venues and 838 nationally representative US participants about their views on the potential development of AI systems with subjective experience and how such systems should be treated and governed. When asked to estimate the chances that such systems will exist on specific dates, the median responses were 1% (AI researchers) and 5% (public) by 2024, 25% and 30% by 2034, and 70% and 60% by 2100, respectively. The median member of the public thought there was a higher chance that AI systems with subjective experience would never exist (25%) than the median AI researcher did (10%). Both groups perceived a need for multidisciplinary expertise to assess AI subjective experience. Although support for welfare protections for such AI systems exceeded opposition, it remained far lower than support for protections for animals or the environment. Attitudes toward moral and governance issues were divided in both groups, especially regarding whether such systems should be created and what rights or protections they should receive. Y et a majority of respondents in both groups agreed that safeguards against the potential risks from AI systems with subjective experience should be implemented by AI developers now, and if created, AI systems with subjective experience should treat others well, behave ethically, and be held accountable. Overall, these results suggest that both AI researchers and the public regard the emergence of AI systems with subjective experience as a possibility this century, though substantial uncertainty and disagreement remain about the timeline and appropriate response. Noemi Dreksler (corresponding author) can be reached under noemi.dreksler@governance.ai.

Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages--with sixteenth-century folktales about a golem made of clay and summoned to life, through ritual incantation, to defend Prague's Jewish community --its modern form was set in motion by a play called "R.U.R.," by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Its 1921 première, also in Prague, set the agenda for the next century, and it has remained an apparently ironclad convention that all critical writing about the genre begin there. The drama gave us the word "robot," a derivative of an Old Slavic root related to "serfdom," and its narrative, of a rebellion among artificial workers, provided a metaphorical template--stories about robots are stories about labor and freedom. The word "robot" is still with us, and the underlying metaphor has a generous flexibility, encompassing two related but distinct ideas. One is that the first thing we would obviously do with artificial people is enslave them--as in, say, "Westworld."

Machine Ethics decisions should consider the implications of uncertainty over decisions. Decisions should be made over sequences of actions to reach preferable outcomes long term. The evaluation of outcomes, however, may invoke one or more moral theories, which might have conflicting judgements. Each theory will require differing representations of the ethical situation. For example, Utilitarianism measures numerical values, Deontology analyses duties, and Virtue Ethics emphasises moral character. While balancing potentially conflicting moral considerations, decisions may need to be made, for example, to achieve morally neutral goals with minimal costs. In this paper, we formalise the problem as a Multi-Moral Markov Decision Process and a Multi-Moral Stochastic Shortest Path Problem. We develop a heuristic algorithm based on Multi-Objective AO*, utilising Sven-Ove Hansson's Hypothetical Retrospection procedure for ethical reasoning under uncertainty. Our approach is validated by a case study from Machine Ethics literature: the problem of whether to steal insulin for someone who needs it.

The discourse on risks from advanced AI systems ("AIs") typically focuses on misuse, accidents and loss of control, but the question of AIs' moral status could have negative impacts which are of comparable significance and could be realised within similar timeframes. Our paper evaluates these impacts by investigating (1) the factual question of whether future advanced AI systems will be conscious, together with (2) the epistemic question of whether future human society will broadly believe advanced AI systems to be conscious. Assuming binary responses to (1) and (2) gives rise to four possibilities: in the true positive scenario, society predominantly correctly believes that AIs are conscious; in the false positive scenario, that belief is incorrect; in the true negative scenario, society correctly believes that AIs are not conscious; and lastly, in the false negative scenario, society incorrectly believes that AIs are not conscious. The paper offers vivid vignettes of the different futures to ground the two-dimensional framework. Critically, we identify four major risks: AI suffering, human disempowerment, geopolitical instability, and human depravity. We evaluate each risk across the different scenarios and provide an overall qualitative risk assessment for each scenario. Our analysis suggests that the worst possibility is the wrong belief that AI is non-conscious, followed by the wrong belief that AI is conscious. The paper concludes with the main recommendations to avoid research aimed at intentionally creating conscious AI and instead focus efforts on reducing our current uncertainties on both the factual and epistemic questions on AI consciousness.

"Do you think people will ever fall in love with machines?" I asked the 12-year-old son of one of my friends. "Yes!" he said, instantly and with conviction. He and his sister had recently visited the Las Vegas Sphere and its newly installed Aura robot--an AI system with an expressive face, advanced linguistic capacities similar to ChatGPT, and the ability to remember visitors' names. "I think of Aura as my friend," added his 15-year-old sister.

Abstract: An Artificially Intelligent system (an AI) has debatable personhood if it's epistemically possible either that the AI is a person or that it falls far short of personhood. Debatable personhood is a likely outcome of AI development and might arise soon. Debatable AI personhood throws us into a catastrophic moral dilemma: Either treat the systems as moral persons and risk sacrificing real human interests for the sake of entities without interests worth the sacrifice, or don't treat the systems as moral persons and risk perpetrating grievous moral wrongs against them. The moral issues become even more perplexing if we consider cases of possibly conscious AI that are subhuman, superhuman, or highly divergent from us in their morally relevant properties. We might soon build artificially intelligent entities - AIs - of debatable personhood. Our systems and habits of ethical thinking are currently as unprepared for this decision as medieval physics was for space flight.

This report documents the history of research on AI rights and other moral consideration of artificial entities. It highlights key intellectual influences on this literature as well as research and academic discussion addressing the topic more directly. We find that researchers addressing AI rights have often seemed to be unaware of the work of colleagues whose interests overlap with their own. Academic interest in this topic has grown substantially in recent years; this reflects wider trends in academic research, but it seems that certain influential publications, the gradual, accumulating ubiquity of AI and robotic technology, and relevant news events may all have encouraged increased academic interest in this specific topic. We suggest four levers that, if pulled on in the future, might increase interest further: the adoption of publication strategies similar to those of the most successful previous contributors; increased engagement with adjacent academic fields and debates; the creation of specialized journals, conferences, and research institutions; and more exploration of legal rights for artificial entities.