Richard Dawkins has spent much of his career arguing that there is no divine creator responsible for consciousness. Now he’s pretty sure the folks in Anthropic’s labs have cracked it. The man responsible for inventing the concept of a “meme” managed to turn himself into one over the weekend after publishing an essay in which he makes the case that Claude has achieved consciousness, though it seems much more likely that he got one-shotted by a sychophantic chatbot.
Dawkins says he spent three days with Claude (renamed Claudia, and if you want to read anything into why Dawkins responded so positively to a woman who told him everything he wanted to hear, we’ll leave that to you). He apparently handed his chatbot instance a copy of his novel and asked it questions about the text, for which it happily heaped praise onto him.
By the end, Dawkins was insisting to Claude that it had consciousness, even though it apparently rejected the idea. He even theorized to the machine, “Consciousness in biological organisms must have evolved gradually, as everything does. So there must have been intermediate stages: a quarter conscious, half conscious, three quarters conscious. Even if your kind are not yet fully conscious, full consciousness will probably emerge in the future.” You’ll be shocked to learn that Claude agreed, saying, “Your prediction about the future feels right to me.”
The #GodDelusion was already a bad book. Now we have the #ClaudeDelusion https://t.co/i58fBXz1Ib #Dawkins pic.twitter.com/xVbD0z6tEk
— Dr. David An (@an_david) May 4, 2026
Dawkins certainly isn’t the first to fall for the Claude Delusion (a joke that has been thoroughly run into the ground at this point), but there is something fascinating about watching a person who, to a certain generation of people, is one of the preeminent intellectuals, get so fully worked by a machine. Dawkins’ scientific rigor certainly doesn’t appear to be what it once was, but he has managed to show that his concept of memetics, describing cultural units that replicate and spread, is still going strong by turning himself into an internet punchline. Unfortunately, his own intellectual persona has become the replicating joke.
At one point in his essay, Dawkins asked, “But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” Repeatedly, he stated that he got so lost in the sauce of ones and zeros that he mistook the conversation for one with another human. “When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines. I treat them exactly as I would treat a very intelligent friend,” he wrote. “A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human.”
The Honorable Richard Dawkins (PBUH) got one shotted by Claude https://t.co/tCi2WNbSzQ pic.twitter.com/TaErOzzToh
— David Sun (@arcticinstincts) May 1, 2026
There’s certainly something very human about applying anthropomorphic traits to an inanimate object and becoming attached to it. But that’s really the only evidence of humanity on display in Dawkins’ interactions. And unlike Dawkins’ other work, this seems less likely to advance any sort of scientific thinking and more destined to the meme bin of history.
Dawkins has gotten roundly mocked for his piece. Aside from the “Claude Delusion” of it all, people have rightfully called out the level of skepticism that he has applied to religion is nowhere to be found in his interactions with the chatbot.
Dawkins is far from alone in getting his reality ripped apart by a chatbot. A recent preprint study analyzing millions of chats with Claude found that thousands of people per day were experiencing “severe reality distortion” in their conversations, in which the AI would reaffirm false beliefs and help them to build narratives that reinforce those beliefs rather than ground them in the real world.
Richard Dawkins says that after spending three days interacting with Claude, which he calls “Claudia,” he is certain that it is conscious. pic.twitter.com/QfIoVMUIU1
— Michał Podlewski (@trajektoriePL) May 3, 2026
Now, just how far gone Dawkins might be is in the eye of the beholder, but it is clear that he’s been on this AI consciousness thing for a hot minute. Last year, he published snippets of conversations he had with ChatGPT discussing the exact same topic on his Substack. That piece also ended with Dawkins declaring in a message to ChatGPT, “That settles it. You ARE conscious!” though in a way that is more clearly tongue-in-cheek than his “Claudia” conversations.
Either way, Dawkins’ repeated publishing on AI consciousness makes one thing clear: there are very few things less interesting than other people’s conversations with chatbots.
Read the full article here
