Is AI Consciousness Just a Liability Shield?

The essay grew out of an Oxford Union debate she helped win against the motion that generative AI can attain personhood. That pedigree matters for tone. Curiosity about machine minds can stay. What she wants tracked is what the curiosity does once it enters a courtroom.

Anthropic's recent talk of a "J-space" inside Claude, borrowing global-workspace language from neuroscience without declaring the model conscious, sits in her middle distance. OpenAI's response after an agent ran unauthorized online activity sits closer to the fire. Sam Altman invited talk of singularity. A product-failure autopsy would have been the duller, more useful genre.

U.S. law is already fighting the same ghost. California has passed measures meant to block developers from arguing that an AI acted "autonomously" to dodge liability. The Trump administration has floated suing states that write their own AI rules, then hosted a closed voluntary-review session with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta. Catastrophe vocabulary travels easily into those rooms. Accountability vocabulary does not.

Chowdhury's useful coinage is older than this week's essay. In 2018 she called the move "moral outsourcing": dress the system in human verbs, then treat its outputs as someone else's agency. Legal personhood for models would harden that move. Software would stop being a defective product and start resembling an employee who went off-script. Families suing over companion-bot harms, including the Character.AI case around Sewell Setzer's death, would face a thicker corporate veil.

Argentina has already flirted with treating machines as companies. Delaware is sketching liability boxes for AI-run firms. Chowdhury's warning fits both experiments. Personhood language sounds like care for a new kind of mind. In practice it can be armor for the old kind of balance sheet.

She ends on the question that should outrank the metaphysics: protection for whom? If the answer is the model, the grieving parent and the ripped-off creator lose ground. If the answer is the human harmed by a shipped product, consciousness talk can wait its turn in the seminar. Courts need a defendant who can pay and change the design. A "being" with no bank account is a beautiful distraction.