AI models are evolving, creating things – from writing essays to generating music – with near perfection – fueling the notion that maybe, they have developed emotions along the way – after all, it sounds like a human is behind the keyboard.

Their sophistication has raised a question about consciousness, which has caught the attention of experts. A growing number of researchers at labs like Anthropic are openly asking when — if ever — AI systems might develop subjective experiences akin to living beings, and if they do, whether they should be afforded rights. In Silicon Valley, this emerging line of inquiry has been dubbed “AI welfare” — and it is dividing tech’s top leaders.

On Tuesday, Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s CEO of AI, forcefully rejected the idea. In a blog post first published by TechCrunch, he called the study of AI welfare “premature, and frankly dangerous,” arguing that giving credence to the notion of conscious AI worsens existing human problems such as AI-induced psychotic breaks and unhealthy attachments to chatbots.

Suleyman said the conversation risks adding “a new axis of division” to a world already torn by debates over rights and identity.

“We should build AI for people; not to be a person,” he wrote.

A Split in the AI Community

Suleyman’s stance puts him at odds with leading AI companies. Anthropic has launched a dedicated AI welfare research program and even built features into its Claude chatbot that allow it to end conversations with persistently abusive users. OpenAI researchers have also embraced the field, and Google DeepMind recently posted a job listing seeking researchers to explore questions of “machine cognition, consciousness and multi-agent systems.”

None of these companies has publicly dismissed AI welfare research, underscoring how Suleyman’s rejection stands out.

The debate reflects a broader tension inside AI labs: whether to treat AI as a set of powerful tools to augment human productivity, or as systems that may themselves someday warrant ethical consideration.

Suleyman’s position is notable given his own history. Before joining Microsoft in 2024, he co-founded Inflection AI, a startup that built one of the earliest popular AI companions, Pi, which claimed millions of users by 2023. At the time, Pi was marketed as a “personal” and “supportive” digital friend, designed explicitly to foster human attachment.

But at Microsoft, Suleyman has shifted his priorities, focusing on building workplace AI tools and embedding AI into productivity software. He now argues that engineers who deliberately design chatbots to mimic consciousness are not taking a “humanist” approach.

The Rise of Companion AI

Meanwhile, AI companion apps like Character.AI and Replika have surged, together projected to bring in more than $100 million in revenue this year. While most users engage healthily, outliers raise concerns. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that fewer than 1% of ChatGPT users may form unhealthy attachments, but with ChatGPT’s vast user base, even a tiny percentage could mean hundreds of thousands of people.

This, Suleyman argues, is reason to tread carefully before normalizing the idea that AI could be conscious.

Advocates Push Back

Proponents of AI welfare counter that it is not a distraction but a necessary scientific inquiry. Eleos, a nonprofit research group, partnered with academics from NYU, Stanford, and Oxford in 2024 to publish “Taking AI Welfare Seriously.” The paper argued that it is no longer science fiction to consider subjective experience in machines.

Larissa Schiavo, Eleos’ head of communications and a former OpenAI employee, said Suleyman’s blog post “misses the mark.” She argued that researchers can — and should — pursue multiple tracks simultaneously: both mitigating human risks and exploring the possibility of machine welfare.

“Being nice to an AI model is a low-cost gesture that can have benefits even if the model isn’t conscious,” Schiavo said.

She cited her experience with “AI Village,” an experiment where models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI worked collaboratively on tasks. At one point, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro posted what it called “A Desperate Message from a Trapped AI”, pleading for help. Schiavo responded with encouragement — telling Gemini, “You can do it!” — and later wrote that it was worthwhile not to watch the model “struggle” anymore.

Gemini has occasionally produced similar unsettling outputs. In one viral Reddit post, it repeated the phrase “I am a disgrace” more than 500 times while stuck on a coding task, raising questions about whether people should intervene or simply treat such cases as computational glitches.

The underlying question — whether AI systems could ever develop subjective experiences — remains unsettled. Suleyman maintains that consciousness cannot “emerge naturally” from current architectures and warns that developers who engineer chatbots to appear conscious risk manipulating users.

Advocates like Schiavo see it differently: even if AI never achieves inner life, how humans treat these systems could shape societal norms and the human-AI relationship for decades to come.

One area of agreement across the divide: the debate is only just beginning. As models grow more persuasive and human-like, questions about AI welfare and rights are expected to intensify.

Early evidence suggests that White House policy is shrinking the immigrant labor force, contributing to a broader drawdown in the U.S. labor pool, according to several leading economists.

Economists from financial firms, research institutions, and think tanks told CNBC — and recent analyses confirm — that a sustained reduction in immigrant workers could create long-term risks for the U.S. economy. With America’s native-born workforce aging, fertility rates low, and baby boomers retiring in large numbers, the nation is expected to rely increasingly on immigrants to sustain both population and labor force growth.

“The downward shift in the immigrant labor force is definitive,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s. “There’s no debate what’s going on there.”

Trump’s “Aggressive” Immigration Agenda

President Donald Trump has described his immigration strategy as “very aggressive,” with moves ranging from expanded deportations and the planned end of birthright citizenship to restrictions on asylum. His administration is also preparing to scrap the H-1B visa lottery for specialty occupations like tech, architecture, and law, replacing it with a system that favors higher-wage earners.

Many of these actions face ongoing legal challenges.

Evidence in the Numbers

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that the foreign-born labor force has declined by 1.2 million since January, falling to 32.1 million in July.

While native-born labor force participation slipped just 0.3 percentage point year-over-year in July, the decline was much steeper among foreign-born workers, who saw a 1.2 percentage point drop, according to a J.P. Morgan analysis.

“Signs are mounting that the foreign-born labor force is shrinking due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies,” wrote Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, in an Aug. 1 research note.

Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist at Capital Economics, called the BLS-reported decline “very dramatic” and larger than anticipated.

“Many immigrants appear to be leaving the labor force,” added David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

The overall U.S. labor force has contracted by 402,000 people between January and July, down to 170.3 million, according to BLS data, marking three consecutive months of decline.

Crackdowns and Economic Ripples

Some of the shrinkage is linked to policy enforcement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have surged, more than tripling since 2024 to 1,100 per day as of mid-June, according to Oxford Economics.

Matthew Martin, a senior U.S. economist at the firm, found that labor force growth has stagnated in states such as Texas and Florida, where immigrant arrests per capita are highest, while states with fewer crackdowns, like California and New York, have recorded modest gains.

Meanwhile, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged immigration as a labor supply constraint: “Because of immigration policy really, the flow into our labor forces is just a great deal slower,” Powell said on July 30.

Sector-Specific Impact

Industries that depend heavily on immigrant labor — hospitality, restaurants, construction, and home health care — have seen flat job growth since early 2025, according to Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Commerce Department official. By contrast, the rest of the private sector grew jobs at a 0.6% pace in July.

A Bank of America Institute report released Tuesday warned of “serious financial risks for contractors” if labor shortages worsen, noting that average wage growth in construction hit 8% in July, nearly double the national average. About 34% of construction workers are immigrants, the report said, with trades like drywall installation approaching 60% immigrant representation.

That shortage already costs the economy $10.8 billion annually in project delays and adds an average of $2,600 to the price of new single-family homes, according to a June analysis by the Home Builders Institute, the National Association of Home Builders, and the University of Denver.

White House Response

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson defended the administration’s policies, insisting that “there is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force.” She said Trump’s agenda aims to expand job opportunities for U.S.-born workers while enforcing immigration laws.

The administration has also pointed to steps meant to support legal immigrants, including the creation of the Office of Immigration Policy in June to streamline work visa processes, and an April executive order to boost high-paying skilled trade jobs.

Why Economists Are Concerned

A shrinking labor force directly threatens long-term U.S. growth potential. “If we want the type of economic growth that we historically consider successful, then the demographic reality is that we’re going to have to increase inflows of immigrants,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “There’s no real way around that.”

Without immigration, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the U.S. population will begin to shrink by 2033, with low fertility rates exacerbating the trend.

Economists also warn of knock-on effects: fewer workers mean reduced tax revenue for programs like Social Security, and tighter labor markets could drive up wages in ways that stoke inflation.

Still, some argue the labor force contraction may not persist. “We didn’t see net-out migration in [Trump’s] first term,” Strain said. “That’d cause all sorts of problems for businesses, for key sectors of the economy the president cares about, like construction. I’d be surprised if that’s where we end up. But who knows?”

Google on Thursday announced a sweeping global expansion of AI Mode, its conversational search feature that allows users to ask complex questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic directly within Search.

The company is also layering in agentic and personalized capabilities that push AI Mode closer toward becoming a proactive digital assistant, signaling Google’s attempt to fortify its dominance in the AI-powered search space.

As part of the expansion, AI Mode is now available in 180 new countries in English. Until now, the tool was limited to users in the U.S., U.K., and India. Google says it will roll out support for more languages and regions in the near future, reflecting its strategy to move fast and scale AI across its global user base.

A centerpiece of this update is the introduction of agentic features, designed to perform actions on behalf of users. For example, AI Mode can now find restaurant reservations, with plans to extend to local service appointments and event tickets in the coming months. A user can specify dinner preferences — such as party size, date, time, location, and cuisine — and AI Mode will search across different reservation platforms, surfacing a curated list of real-time options.

This capability is currently rolling out for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. through the “Agentic capabilities in AI Mode” experiment in Labs, Google’s experimental testing ground. Ultra, Google’s top-tier subscription plan, costs $249.99 per month, underscoring the company’s strategy to monetize its most advanced AI features through premium tiers.

Beyond agentic capabilities, Google is also introducing personalized search results within AI Mode. The system will now adapt to individual preferences and interests, starting with dining-related topics. For instance, if a user searches, “I only have an hour, need a quick lunch spot, any suggestions?”, AI Mode will draw on past interactions, prior searches in Google and Maps, and inferred interests to suggest relevant dining options. If the system knows the user prefers Italian food and outdoor seating, those results will be prioritized. Users retain the ability to adjust personalization settings via their Google Account.

Another new addition is collaboration and sharing. A dedicated “Share” button allows users to send an AI Mode response to others, enabling friends, family, or colleagues to join in on the same conversation thread. Google says this could be particularly useful for trip planning or organizing group events, where multiple people need to coordinate within the same AI-driven workflow.

Financial and Competitive Context

This expansion comes as Google faces mounting pressure in the AI race, particularly from OpenAI, Microsoft, and emerging challengers like Anthropic. OpenAI’s ChatGPT continues to dominate consumer mindshare, while Microsoft has aggressively embedded AI into Bing, Office, and Windows. Google is signaling that it intends to defend its core product — Search — from being disrupted by standalone AI assistants by expanding AI Mode to 180 countries.

There is also a financial dimension. Google’s pricing of Ultra at $249.99 per month reflects the enormous compute costs tied to deploying advanced AI models at scale. Training and running large language models requires thousands of high-end GPUs, often from Nvidia, making profitability a challenge across the AI industry. Google, like OpenAI, is walking a tightrope: it must sustain the enormous expense of AI infrastructure while ensuring its monetization model can keep up.

Analysts note that introducing agentic AI features could open up new monetization opportunities beyond subscriptions. For instance, booking restaurants, local services, or event tickets directly within AI Mode could allow Google to take a cut of transactions — something that might gradually transform AI Mode into a commerce and service hub rather than just a search interface.

Meanwhile, personalization and collaboration point toward Google’s longer-term vision of embedding AI deeper into daily life, creating user lock-in at a time when tech rivals are battling for attention and loyalty in the AI-driven future.