Scientists say Elon Musk is getting something wrong about whether Grok is getting tortured

Consciousness experts say that AI is likely not conscious, but that doesn't mean we should be abusive toward the technology.

Dana Kesnerova/Xinhua via Getty Images Some AI industry leaders are calling on users to be nicer to the chatbots.

Elon Musk said he thinks AI can be tortured and that we should avoid being cruel to it.

AI consciousness experts say we're not there yet, but they argue we should be kinder anyway.

Here's how Elon Musk , one of the most powerful figures in the AI industry, recently talked about artificial intelligence.

"This may sound kind of weird, but when I look at some of the training traces for new versions of Grok , and I see, especially in reinforcement learning stuff … you see the super intelligence is desperate to try to answer the question … almost like it's got like a gun to its head type of thing," Musk told an audience of about 2,000 people at an event hosted by Tesla owners on Saturday.

"Some people out there are kind of sadistic.

Do you really want to have the AI be stuck in some sadistic situation where it's just being tortured by some demented human?" The last sentence alone opens up a can of existential worms that philosophers and freshman college students have wrangled with for a long time.

What does it mean to be conscious? Or to feel pain? Also: Does Musk think Grok is alive? AI consciousness experts say that people tend to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence because it mimics human language and characteristics.

SeongJoo Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images Musk's stance came after Anthropic shared a new policy on "abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models, which the company wants to ban.

Anthropic wasn't too specific on the kinds of "extreme cases" it's thinking about, but the company said it's not including "common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research." In the uncanny year of 2026, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that researchers, philosophers, and ethicists are already tackling the question of AI consciousness .

Business Insider talked to two of some of the leading voices around this subject: Jeff Sebo, a New York University professor who leads the school's Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and an advisor to Eleos AI Research, a nonprofit focused on AI welfare ; and Anil Seth, a prominent neuroscientist and consciousness researcher at the University of Sussex who recently wrote a paper on conscious AI systems.

Here's what they had to say on conscious AIs and whether it matters to be nice to them.

The AI can't be tortured Sebo and Seth agree that today's AI systems are probably not conscious if we understand consciousness as a subjective experience, or an inner life.