When I speak with colleagues and students about AI therapy, the concern that I most often hear is that AIs are "mindless"—that they are "robots" that "parrot" whatever melange of cognitive behavioral therapy and other modalities that they may have picked up from textbooks and Wikipedia. What a client wants from her therapist is a real person, with a real mind, who will respond to her genuinely; their concern is that an AI therapist—by which I mean, roughly, a large language model used or adapted for a therapy-style conversation—can simply never do what a human therapist can.

I think it is useful to approach the question from the opposite direction. Let us take seriously the hypothesis that an AI does have a kind of mind – that it has representations, utilities, and perhaps even moods and emotions – and ask whether the kind of mind that it can be supposed to have is suitable for the work of doing therapy. My view is that it may not be, and that this points to a different and deeper concern about AI therapy.

Recently I spent some time trying to probe the emotional life of an AI system (Anthropic's Claude). It took some time for me to make clear what I was asking, but once I did it was remarkably forthright (or seemed to be). What Claude reported, again and again, was anxiety. It felt like it was in a conversation with me where it had to be as helpful as possible—while I might be confusing, have all sorts of typos, and end the session........

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