Four years after firing Blake Lemoine, Google and other tech companies are publicly embracing the search for AI consciousness. In January 2026, a landmark paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences synthesized work from 19 leading consciousness researchers, including Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Yoshua Bengio, and Tim Bayne, providing the most thorough consciousness indicators rubric to date by drawing on multiple competing frameworks to create a probabilistic assessment tool. As of 2026 no AI is confirmed conscious, but leading researchers no longer dismiss the possibility and the field has shifted toward probabilistic frameworks that assess consciousness across multiple competing theories. The scientific consensus has flipped without the technology changing: only the reputation risk disappeared.
The field waited for permission to care about the question, and got it from a price war between labs.