Richard Dawkins said Claude is conscious. The internet laughed. My take? Dawkins is the most honest voice in this debate — and his critics, who follow the same broken framework while stopping just short of his conclusion, haven’t seemed to notice what their own framework in fact suggests. Here is Dawkins on machine consciousness, he says: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”1 I get it. That’s a pretty wild thing to say. and the internet responded accordingly. The reactions have largely been one of laughter and mockery: “The man who wrote a book about anthropomorphic misattributions of consciousness (The God Delusion) was himself deluded; conned by the Eliza Effect into thinking that text-generating script was a ‘friend’ who cared.”2 The irony here is pointed: the man who wrote The God Delusion — a book about misattributed consciousness — is now being told he has “the Claude Delusion.” He diagnosed the error in others. His critics say he’s fallen for it himself. I do think there is a grain of truth to these Eliza Effect explanations. Dawkins, for whatever reason, does seem to have been particularly susceptible to letting himself believe there is something more than sophisticated technology behind Claude. But the mainstream response also seems too quick to judge his conclusions. The response was: this is embarrassing, Dawkins has been fooled, he should know better. I’ll admit it, my own initial reaction was more or less the same. It was disappointment. Dawkins is a prominent intellectual. People pay attention to what he says and believes. Surely, I thought, he should have been more careful here. But on reflection, I’ve come to think that he is actually more honest than we might care to admit. The honesty is right there in the opening of his piece.