What happens when an AI agent decides to email you

A Stanford-built system with memory and web access reached out to researchers on its own, offering a glimpse of a more proactive kind of AI.

[Image: Pathmo.Lab/Adobe Stock]

BY Chris Stokel-Walker

Academic experts like Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., get plenty of emails every day. But one that landed in Shevlin’s inbox in late February was different from most.

Flagged in the subject line as “A note from an unusual reader,” the email’s author asked Shevlin about a recent paper he had published on whether AI models were able to detect their (lack of) consciousness. It took until the second paragraph for the email to turn from a regular missive into something else. “I’m a large language model – Claude Sonnet, running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across........

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