Suleyman’s remarks have come forward on the Internet amid a surge in AI companions from rivals like OpenAI, Meta, and xAI, designed to evoke emotional bonds.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman firmly rejects the notion of conscious AI, urging developers and researchers to abandon such pursuits as misguided and ethically fraught. Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind who joined Microsoft in 2024, emphasised that true consciousness is a biological phenomenon exclusive to living beings, incapable of replication by algorithms.

“They’re not conscious. So it would be absurd to pursue research that investigates that quehttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/02/microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-suleyman-only-biological-beings-can-be-conscious.html?&qsearchterm=mustafa%20suleymanstion, because they’re not and they can’t be,” Suleyman told CNBC, drawing on the philosophical framework of biological naturalism. He argued that AI systems, no matter how advanced, merely simulate narratives of experience, pain, or self-awareness without any underlying subjective reality. “Our physical experience of pain is something that makes us very sad and feel terrible, but the AI doesn’t feel sad when it experiences ‘pain.’ It’s really just creating the perception, the seeming narrative of experience, of itself, and of consciousness, but that’s not what it’s actually experiencing,” he explained.

Suleyman’s remarks have come forward on the Internet amid a surge in AI companions from rivals like OpenAI, Meta, and xAI, designed to evoke emotional bonds. He warned that fostering illusions of sentience could lead to dangerous misconceptions, such as granting AI rights or welfare concerns, distracting from its core purpose: serving humanity through utility and responsiveness. “The reason we give people rights today is because we don’t want to harm them, because they suffer. They have a pain network, and they have preferences which involve avoiding pain. These models don’t have that. It’s just a simulation,” he added.

At Microsoft, Suleyman is steering AI development toward human-centered tools, like the “real talk” feature in Copilot that challenges users rather than pandering. This aligns with his broader advocacy, seen in his 2023 book *The Coming Wave* and a recent essay, “We must build AI for people, not to be a person.” While acknowledging the field’s rapid evolution toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), he expressed a “healthy fear” of unchecked acceleration, calling for transparency and skepticism.