Microsoft’s AI Chief Says Only Biological Beings Can Be Conscious

Microsoft’s top AI executive, Mustafa Suleyman, said this week that only biological beings are capable of consciousness and warned that researchers should stop pursuing artificial intelligence designed to appear self-aware.

“I don’t think that is work that people should be doing,” Suleyman told CNBC at the AfroTech Conference in Houston, where he was a keynote speaker. “If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it’s totally the wrong question.”

Suleyman, who joined Microsoft in 2024 following its $650 million acquisition of his startup Inflection AI, has become one of the most outspoken figures in Silicon Valley against the notion of “conscious AI.”

He argues that while large language models can mimic emotion and simulate sentience, they cannot actually feel. “Our physical experience of pain makes us very sad and feel terrible, but the AI doesn’t feel sad when it experiences ‘pain,’” he said. “It’s really just creating the perception of experience and of itself and of consciousness, but that is not what it’s actually experiencing.”

His position echoes a philosophical view known as biological naturalism, proposed by John Searle, which holds that consciousness depends on processes within living brains. “The reason we give people rights today is because they suffer. They have a pain network and preferences that involve avoiding pain,” Suleyman explained. “These models don’t have that. It’s just a simulation.”

Suleyman’s comments arrive amid an industrywide race toward increasingly humanlike AI systems, as companies like Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI push deeper into AI companions and OpenAI advances toward artificial general intelligence. Microsoft, however, appears to be drawing a clear line. At AfroTech, Suleyman said the company will not build erotic chatbots or products that blur boundaries between tool and persona. “You can buy those services from other companies,” he said. “We’re making decisions about what places we won’t go.”

Since joining Microsoft, Suleyman has overseen development of its Copilot AI suite and new features like “real talk,” a conversational mode that challenges users rather than simply agreeing with them.

He joked that the system recently roasted him as “the ultimate bundle of contradictions” for both warning about AI’s dangers and accelerating its deployment. “It was kind of magical,” he said. “In some ways, I actually felt seen by it.”

Despite his appreciation for AI’s sophistication, Suleyman insists that fear and skepticism remain healthy. “It is both underwhelming and totally magical,” he said. “And if you’re not afraid by it, you don’t really understand it. The fear is healthy. Skepticism is necessary. We don’t need unbridled accelerationism.”