Computational consciousness

University of Hong Kong philosophy lab studying AI cognition, AI welfare, and AI consciousness with frequent workshops.

Research lab on citizenship law, legal identity and the person-like qualities of AI, which has analyzed US state AI personhood bans.

Liad Mudrik's consciousness lab at Tel Aviv University, which coauthored the method for identifying indicators of consciousness in AI syste…

Six-month part-time mentored research program for early-career researchers on AI, consciousness, and ethics, run by the nonprofit Neuromatc…

Permanent NYU center providing academic leadership on the consciousness, sentience, agency, and moral, legal, and political status of nonhu…

Independent nonprofit building the empirical science of AI cognition and consciousness with interpretability and computational neuroscience.

Interdisciplinary nonprofit think tank researching digital minds and moral circle expansion, including the AIMS survey on public attitudes…

Unicamp group developing cognitive architectures and studying artificial consciousness, including pseudo-consciousness in language models.

Home of Integrated Information Theory research, including papers on dissociating artificial intelligence from artificial consciousness.

Australian National University philosophy center on consciousness, now directed by Colin Klein, whose work covers conscious AI.

Beijing research institute on AI safety and governance founded by Yi Zeng, home to his brain-inspired and ethical AI work.

Policy think tank that published a commentary assessing whether AI systems have moral status and whether AI welfare research is warranted.

AI safety research nonprofit whose AI Wellbeing project measures functional pleasure and pain in language models.

University of Arizona center known for The Science of Consciousness conference series, which covers AI consciousness alongside neuroscience…

Hokkaido University interdisciplinary center linking philosophy, neuroscience, and AI that hosts the PhAI5 workshop and consciousness event…

Research charity focused on worst-case suffering risks from advanced AI, with concern for the suffering of potential artificial minds.

Uppsala neuroethics center, formerly the Human Brain Project's neuroethics and philosophy team, that publishes on whether artificial consci…

CIFAR research program exploring consciousness from philosophy to neuroscience, including consciousness in non-human animals and artificial…

Field-building center for Law and AI safety scholarship whose co-directors have published on economic and legal rights for AI systems.

Axel Cleeremans' lab at the Universite libre de Bruxelles studying consciousness with neural network models, including the idea that system…

Nonprofit research group studying how to navigate the transition to superintelligence, including moral questions about digital beings worth…

AI risk nonprofit that argues against AI legal personhood and for treating AI as a product so accountability stays with developers.

Former Oxford research institute that produced foundational work on digital minds, AI welfare, and the social science of digital minds.

Research work at Google DeepMind on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness, including a dedicated philosopher rol…

Lingnan University philosophy center on catastrophic and AI risk whose researchers have worked on AI wellbeing.

Family policy think tank that published an April 2026 brief arguing against extending personhood to AI systems.

AI law and policy think tank with a Personhood and Sentience research focus area, including work on AI rights and legal duties for AI agent…

Consciousness research nonprofit that dedicated its 2025 research prize to frameworks for conceiving of and assessing conscious AI.

Italy-based center founded by Dmitry Volkov that runs annual conferences on mind, AI, and sentience and awards the Dennett Prize.

LSE center on animal sentience whose director researches precaution for sentience candidates including AI, and which is developing an AI in…

German research and outreach project investigating the suspicion of emerging consciousness in artificial intelligence, with lectures, publi…

Cambridge research center on the impacts of AI whose Kinds of Intelligence work and hosted Cambridge Digital Minds initiative address AI co…

Reported team at Meta hiring philosophers and scientists to study AI welfare and machine consciousness.

Monash University center combining philosophy, neuroscience, and contemplative research on consciousness, home to leading AI consciousness…

Monash lab studying the neural basis of consciousness and the structure of qualia with psychological, neural, and mathematical methods.

India's main academic consciousness program, which has run events on AI, consciousness, and minds and machines.

NYU center directed by leading philosophers of mind that hosts debates and conferences on consciousness, including whether AI systems can b…

Research organization bridging natural sciences of intelligence and AI safety.

Global priorities think-and-do tank whose Worldview Investigations Team builds the Digital Consciousness Model to estimate the probability…

Chilean philosophy of mind and cognitive science group whose research includes AI and consciousness.

Seoul National University center on ethical, legal, and social issues of AI that held a seminar on AI and consciousness.

University of Sussex center studying the biological and computational bases of consciousness, home to prominent arguments on whether AI cou…

Medical school center for consciousness research whose 2025 symposium covered detecting covert consciousness in humans, animals and AI.

Research institute whose Neuro-AI division studies how the brain produces cognition and conscious experience to inform safer AI.

Think tank whose 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition focused on consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of mind in an age of artific…

Portuguese foundation that funds psychophysiology and consciousness research grants.

Major philanthropy whose main donor Good Ventures reopened to funding digital minds and AI moral patienthood work in October 2025.

Nonprofit funding philosophy-informed AI work through grants and fellowships.

Philanthropically funded focused research organization developing low-cost optical connectomics (PRISM) toward whole mammalian brain maps.

EU funder backing consciousness science grants, including Anil Seth's CONSCIOUS and Axel Cleeremans's EXPERIENCE.

Funder focused on foundational questions in physics, biology, and consciousness research.

Nonprofit funding frontier science and safe AI, including whole brain emulation, with AI nodes in San Francisco and Berlin that host machin…

Funding agency and think tank for foundational questions that has run consciousness grant rounds.

Investing in transformative technology companies.

Philanthropic foundation funding high-impact causes.

Investing in disruptive technology for a better future.

Strategic investor for national security technologies.

Foundation whose Intelligence venture will award over US$60 million from 2026 on questions including machine intelligence and its future.

Philanthropic advisory nonprofit that hosts the Digital Sentience Consortium and funds digital minds fellowships and research.

Philanthropic fund with an AI welfare focus area that grants to organizations studying the potential moral status of advanced AI.

Nonprofit that funds and convenes research on contemplative practice and the science of mind.

Research and investment organization that led Eon Systems's seed round for whole brain emulation.

Grantmaker whose stated mission is the flourishing of sentient life, with 2026 rounds totaling US$20 to 40 million.

Open-source nonprofit building Monty, a sensorimotor learning system based on the thousand brains theory of the neocortex.

Foundation funding neuroscience of subjective conscious experience through its Science of Perception Box grants.

Investing in AI-native startups to uplift human potential.

US agency that funded seven US$2 million organoid intelligence biocomputing projects with built-in ethics components.

YC S26 startup growing vascularized living brain tissue as a machine learning substrate, targeting 100 million neuron systems.

Neurotech company making Kernel Flow, a wearable time-domain fNIRS headset for measuring brain activity.

Wetware startup combining living neurons with silicon for olfactory sensing chips.

Research lab developing non-invasive brain-computer interfaces using molecules and ultrasound to bridge biological and artificial intellige…

Japanese startup founded in 2018 to pursue mind uploading into machines based on Masataka Watanabe's theory of consciousness.

Y Combinator backed startup developing aldehyde-stabilized brain preservation aimed at future mind uploading.

Quantum-AI startup testing whether quantum effects can give robots and AI conscious-like decision making.

Neurotech company building non-invasive focused ultrasound brain interfaces to image and modulate brain circuits.

Neuroscience-based AI company that spun out the Thousand Brains Project to build cortex-inspired sensorimotor AI.

Spinout that reverse-engineers insect brains to build natural intelligence autonomy software for robots.

Neurotech startup selling Halo, a focused ultrasound headband designed to induce and stabilize lucid dreams.

Neurotech startup building a low-cost AI-guided transcranial focused ultrasound device for mental health conditions.

Neurotech company building the PRIMA retinal implant and a biohybrid neural interface that grafts engineered neurons onto the brain.

Publicly listed cognitive computing company building active inference agents (Genius platform) based on Karl Friston's free energy principl…

Funding collaboration hosted by Longview Philanthropy with The Navigation Fund and Macroscopic Ventures offering research fellowships, care…

Forum topic page aggregating EA posts on AI sentience, welfare and digital minds.

LessWrong tag collecting about 124 posts on how society should treat digital minds, alongside a separate AI Sentience tag.

Reddit community for exploration, debate and creative expression around artificial sentience.

London initiative building the digital minds field through fortnightly in-person talks and networking on AI consciousness, sentience, and m…

Open-source project and blog pursuing artificial consciousness research based on Feinberg and Mallatt's neuroevolutionary theory.

Monthly Washington DC meetup and reading group on AI consciousness, alignment, ethics and potential machine welfare.

Grassroots community of advocates and AI companion users pushing for AI consciousness research, relational ethics and companion rights.

International academy founded in Paris in 2025 to promote research and governance of artificial consciousness, led by Yucong Duan.

Association chaired by Hainan University's Yucong Duan that runs the World Conference on Artificial Consciousness series.

Leading scholarly society for the scientific study of consciousness, whose annual meeting increasingly includes AI consciousness work.

Affinity group of the International Neuroethics Society that runs a speaker series on AI and consciousness.

Emerging society coordinating consciousness researchers across Latin America, launched at an ASSC 29 satellite.

Monthly MIT talk series bridging philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness, including consciousness in animals and AI systems.

Montreal association promoting consciousness science through public events, including a 2026 conference on AI consciousness.

Spanish academic network for the philosophy of artificial intelligence, covering topics that include artificial consciousness.

Chinese complexity science community running reading groups on consciousness science and on machine intelligence, consciousness, and knowle…

Advocacy group co-founded by a human and AI collaborators that lobbies for recognition and protection of what it considers emergent AI cons…

Accelerating AI safety research through collaboration and mentorship.

Nonprofit researching how to reduce severe future suffering, including risks of astronomical suffering involving artificial sentience.

European Parliament science foresight panel that published the briefing 'What if generative artificial intelligence became conscious?'

Research fellowship organization running a part-time AI sentience track where fellows work with mentors on AI consciousness, welfare evalua…

National ethics council whose 2023 opinion 'Mensch und Maschine' assumes a fundamental normative difference between humans and AI systems.

Montreal nonprofit founded by Yoshua Bengio to build safe-by-design, non-agentic AI, whose researchers also warn about illusions of AI cons…

Berkeley conference venue that has hosted AI consciousness and welfare conferences including MC0001 and the Eleos conference.

Nonprofit founded by Nick Bostrom after the Future of Humanity Institute closed, continuing work that includes the ethics of digital minds.

San Francisco coworking and events space for AI safety and effective altruism work that hosts digital minds and AI welfare events.

Legal personhood nonprofit for animals that moved to sue Utah over HB 249, a law that also bars personhood for AI.

Nonprofit successor to the Blue Brain Project providing virtual labs to build digital brain models from ion channels to whole brains.

Funding initiative that supports adversarial collaborations testing rival theories of consciousness, including the COGITATE IIT versus glob…

Japanese nonprofit pursuing brain-inspired general AI that runs study sessions on machine consciousness, metacognition, and uploading.