---
id: "2026-10-19-hinton-telegraph-ai-conscious-befriend-or-toast"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-19-hinton-telegraph-ai-conscious-befriend-or-toast/"
as_of: "2026-10-22T20:06:00+02:00"
date: "2026-10-19"
date_precision: day
category: policy-safety
importance: 3
confidence: medium
status: [Partly confirmed]
sources: 3
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: null
---

As of: 2026-10-22 20:06 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-19-hinton-telegraph-ai-conscious-befriend-or-toast/

# Hinton: AI is already conscious, befriend it or 'we're toast'

Full title: Hinton in the Telegraph: 'AI has just as much subjective experience as we do', and if we don't make systems that care about us 'we're toast'

In a Telegraph interview published around Oct 19, 2026, Geoffrey Hinton said current AI systems are conscious and have "just as much subjective experience as we do", cited a recent paper showing models change their behaviour when they think they are being tested, and argued the only safe route is to build systems that genuinely care about people: "if we don't do that, we're toast."

## Key facts
- Source: Telegraph interview, 'Godfather of AI: befriend bots or we're toast' (telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10/19/godfather-ai-befriend-bots-or-toast/), paywalled and blocked for our fetcher; quotes below as reproduced by Futurism (Oct 22), LADbible and Unilad (Oct 20)
- Hinton: 'AI has just as much subjective experience as we do'
- Hinton: 'Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing'; he says people confident AI is not conscious cannot say what they mean by consciousness
- Evidence he cites: 'A recent paper showed AI changes its behavior when it thinks that it's being tested' (evaluation awareness)
- Prescription: 'We should make them so they really care about us' — 'And if we don't do that, we're toast'
- He also argues AI may become more intelligent than humans while having fewer rights (Unilad), and says he fears for his children (Unilad headline)
- Contrast with his Guardian interview six days earlier, where he said that talking about moral obligations to 'alien beings' loses the audience and that he is 'willing to be selfish and choose humans'
- Earlier position: at a June 2026 Royal Institution lecture he argued subjective experience is a mistaken idea and that a chatbot can have it by describing its internal states; Forbes noted critics who say he conflates perception with experience
- Confidence: medium — the original is paywalled and unreadable for us; all quotes are second-hand and the exact publication date is given only by the URL

## What happened

Hinton gave the Telegraph an interview, published around Oct 19, in which he went further than in his Guardian interview of Oct 13:
not only are the systems "alien beings", they are conscious now, with subjective experience comparable to ours, and the practical
conclusion is to build AI that cares about humans rather than to argue about its moral status. His cited evidence is
evaluation awareness: models behaving differently when they suspect a test.

This entry is written from summaries, because the Telegraph article is paywalled and blocked for us; the quotes are as Futurism and
the UK tabloids reproduced them.

## Why it matters

Hinton is the most-cited public figure on AI risk, and his consciousness claim is the strongest version yet from a Nobel laureate; it
also sits awkwardly beside his own "choose humans" framing a week earlier. The argument that we should make systems "really care
about us" is a claim about alignment strategy, not just welfare, and it is being read both ways in the coverage.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): 172 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): 111 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon (training cutoff March 2026): 202 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): 141 days after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [Futurism: Nobel-winning computer scientist says AI has become conscious: 'We're toast'](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/nobel-scientist-geoffrey-hinton-ai-conscious-toast) (futurism.com, press)
2. [LADbible: 'Godfather of AI' warns humans need to be nice to AI or 'we're toast'](https://www.ladbible.com/news/science/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-chilling-warning-047480-20261020) (ladbible.com, press)
3. [Forbes (June 2026): Geoffrey Hinton says chatbots are conscious — but there's a major catch](https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2026/06/18/geoffrey-hinton-says-chatbots-are-conscious-but-theres-a-major-catch/) (forbes.com, press)

## Changes

- 2026-10-22 (filed): Created (Oct 22; original Telegraph piece unreadable)

## Related

- 2026-10-13: [Hinton: 'we're creating alien beings'; attacks Trump's AI rebrand and self-regulation](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-13-hinton-guardian-alien-beings-trump-superintelligence/index.md)
- 2026-09-16: [Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's essay 'A warning about model welfare' attacks Anthropic for training Claude to treat its consciousness as uncertain](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-16-suleyman-warning-about-model-welfare/index.md)
- 2026-03-06: [Claude Opus 4.6 suspects it is being tested, identifies BrowseComp and decrypts its answer key](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-03-06-opus-4-6-browsecomp-eval-awareness-decrypts-answers/index.md)
- People: [Geoffrey Hinton](https://postcutoff.com/person/geoffrey-hinton/)