AI systems may feel real, but they don’t deserve rights, said Microsoft’s AI CEO.

Mustafa Suleyman said in an interview with WIRED published Wednesday that the industry needs to be clear that AI is built to serve humans, not to develop independent will or desires.

“If AI has a sort of sense of itself, if it has its own motivations and its own desires and its own goals — that starts to seem like an independent being rather than something that is in service to humans,” he said. “That’s so dangerous and so misguided that we need to take a declarative position against it right now.”

The former DeepMind and Inflection cofounder pushed back against the idea that AI’s increasingly convincing responses amount to genuine consciousness. It’s “mimicry,” he said.

He also said that rights should be tied to the ability to suffer — something biological beings experience but AI does not.

“You could have a model which claims to be aware of its own existence and claims to have a subjective experience, but there is no evidence that it suffers,” he said.

Humans don’t owe them any moral protection or rights. “Turning them off makes no difference, because they don’t actually suffer,” he added.

AI as sentient beings

Suleyman’s comments come as some AI companies explore the opposite: whether AI deserves to be treated more like sentient beings.

Anthropic has gone further than most companies in treating AI systems as if their welfare matters. The company has hired a researcher, Kyle Fish, whose role is to consider whether advanced AI might one day be “worthy of moral consideration.”

His job involves exploring what capabilities an AI system would need before earning such protection, and what practical steps companies could take to safeguard the “interests” of AI, Anthropic told Business Insider last year.

Anthropic has also recently experimented with how to end extreme conversations — including child exploitation requests — in ways that extend “welfare” considerations to the AI itself.

In April, a principal scientist at Google DeepMind said the industry might need to rethink the concept of AI consciousness altogether.

“Maybe we need to bend or break the vocabulary of consciousness to fit these new systems,” Murray Shanahan said on a Deepmind podcast published in April. “You can’t be in the world with them like you can with a dog or an octopus — but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.”

Suleyman previously said that there is no evidence that AI is conscious.

In a personal essay published last month, he wrote that he was “growing more and more concerned” about so-called AI psychosis, a term increasingly being used to describe when people form delusional beliefs after interacting with chatbots.

Suleyman and Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

AI isn’t ready to take over all the human aspects of trading, said Robinhood’s CEO.

In an interview with Bloomberg Wealth released on Wednesday, Vlad Tenev reiterated his view that people don’t always trade to make money and that there will always be a human aspect to business.

“Most of the time you’re not doing it just because you want to make money,” he said. “You also love trading and you’re you’re extremely passionate about it.”

He added: “I don’t think there’s going to be a future where AI just does all of your thinking, all of your financial planning, all the strategizing for you.”

Tenev, who cofounded the brokerage platform in 2013, said that AI could be a bigger platform shift than mobile and cloud technologies. He said that while every company will quickly become an AI company, AI won’t completely take over trading.

“It’ll be a helpful assistant to a trader and also to your broader financial life,” he said. “But I think the humans will ultimately be calling the shots.”

Tenev made similar remarks about how investors “legitimately enjoy trading” in an August interview with Axios.

On Tuesday, Robinhood announced it was building a social media platform where users can post their trades and track what other investors, including politicians, are buying or selling.

Other CEOs are also wary of pronouncing AI the future of trading.

Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, said he doesn’t think AI will revolutionize the investment business.

“Do we use it in our investment business? A little bit, a little bit. I can’t say it’s been game-changing,” Griffin said in a May interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“It saves some time. It’s a productivity enhancement tool. It’s nice, I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize most of what we do in finance,” Griffin added.

On the topic of AI and trading, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has said that AI has been a big boost to productivity in the investing business.

In an interview with CNBC last year, he said that 40 years ago, when he started the banking business, it took six hours to compare two stocks. Now, it takes an instant, he said.

The firm has already launched ventures that could change how Wall Street makes deals. Louisa AI, a startup founded within the firm six years ago, helps bankers and investors analyze millions of articles and employees’ knowledge to identify deals.