Frontiers of Self-Attention and Artificial Consciousness
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series May 18, 2026 Angie Normandale, Sahba Afsharnia, Rasmus Herlo et al.
Amid growing concern about whether frontier artificial intelligence could instantiate consciousness-relevant capacities, we argue that attention self-modelling provides a uniquely tractable target for empirical research in current and future systems. Recent findings in multi-agent and control settings lend fresh support to this approach, demonstrating that attention self-modelling enables both...