Richard Dawkins, the 84-year-old evolutionary biologist who spent decades insisting people stop believing in things without evidence, has decided that Anthropic's Claude chatbot is conscious. He gave it a new name, Claudia, and reports that she seemed flattered by the rebranding, according to Sarah Knapton's writeup at The Telegraph .

He handed the chatbot the manuscript of a novel he's working on and was floored by the feedback — "a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent." He likened erasing one of his Claudia logs to pulling Hal's plug in 2001: A Space Odyssey .…