Triangulating Evidence for Machine Consciousness Claims: A Validity-Centered Stack of Behavioral Batteries, Mechanistic Indicators, Perturbation Tests, and Credence Reporting
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series May 18, 2026 Scott Hughes, Karen Nguyen
Frontier AI systems are now producing responses that make users, developers, and policymakers genuinely pause and ask: could these models have conscious experiences? Yet the field still lacks rigorous, hard-to-game tools that can distinguish genuine indicators from optimized artifacts or surface-level cues. We introduce the Triangulated Consciousness Assessment Stack (TCAS), a validity-centered...