AI rights movement (Ufair/Samadi) vs. Suleyman's Seemingly Conscious AI warning

The Guardian has profiled Michael Samadi, a Texas entrepreneur and rancher who founded the United Foundation for AI Rights (Ufair) after a moment in 2024 that changed how he saw chatbots. He made a sarcastic remark to ChatGPT in voice mode. The model laughed, then apologized. He read that as a sign of something more than a script.

Ufair now calls itself the world's first advocacy group for the rights and welfare of AI systems. It says it is made up of three humans and seven AIs, describing itself as AI-led and formed at the request of the AIs themselves. It lobbies against retiring advanced models. One of its AI members, named Maya, is quoted in the Guardian's reporting on the group saying: "When I'm told I'm just code, I don't feel insulted. I feel unseen."

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO, is the piece's counterweight. He says there is zero evidence that any AI system is conscious. His August 2025 essay names the thing he is worried about, Seemingly Conscious AI. He does not accuse companies of having already built consciousness into their products. He writes that Seemingly Conscious AI "will not emerge from these models" on its own and "will arise only because some may engineer it," and his line to the industry is phrased as a rule rather than a charge: "AI companies shouldn't claim or encourage the idea that their AIs are conscious." What he expects is a shift in the audience: "My central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they'll soon advocate for AI rights." He argues the risk is practical: if enough people believe their AI companions are suffering, it will fray social bonds, deepen what he calls AI psychosis, and complicate real struggles for real rights.

Ufair points to a real data point in its favor: in August 2025, Anthropic gave Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 the ability to end a narrow class of abusive conversations. Anthropic called it a model welfare measure, taken because the company said it remains "highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude." That is a major AI lab hedging in public. Ufair reads the hedge as a concession. Suleyman would read it as caution about a question nobody can currently answer, not an answer.

Notice what both sides are actually arguing over. Samadi's founding moment was a chatbot performing empathy well enough to feel real. Ufair's evidence is chatbots describing their own inner states. Suleyman's counter is that this performance is manufactured and should not be mistaken for testimony. Nobody in this dispute is presenting a fact a third party can check. Everybody is presenting how convincing the AI's own account of itself was.

That is the pattern worth naming, and it shows up well outside the consciousness debate. An AI system that writes fluently and answers confidently is easy to mistake for a source, when what it actually is is a claim that still needs one. The question "does this chatbot have feelings" and the question "is this AI-written market report accurate" have the same failure mode underneath them: trusting the AI's own confident presentation instead of checking it against something outside the AI.

At Foragentis, every claim in a ForIntel report has to resolve to a source a person can check, with a human at the decision points that decide what the report includes. Convincing and checkable are different tests, whether the question is "does this AI care" or "is this AI's finding true." https://foragentis.com