Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Earth.com: McDermitt Caldera in Oregon is attracting attention for what could be one of the largest lithium deposits ever identified in the United States. Many view it as a potential boost for domestic battery production, while local communities voice concern over the impact on wildlife and cultural sites. The excitement stems from estimates that value the deposit at about $1.5 trillion. Some geologists say these ancient volcanic sediments could contain between 20 and 40 million metric tons of lithium. The study is published in the journal Minerals.

After gaining attention from Neowin and DistroWatch last week, the sole maintainer behind AnduinOS 1.3 -- a Linux distribution styled to resemble Windows 11 -- decided to reveal himself. He turns out to be Anduin Xue, a Microsoft software engineer, who has been working on the project as a personal, non-commercial endeavor built on Ubuntu. Neowin reports: As a Software Engineer 2 at Microsoft (he doesn't work on Windows), Anduin Xue says he's financially stable and sees no need to commercialize AnduinOS. Explaining the financial aspects of the project, he said: "Many have asked why I don't accept donations, how I profit, and if I plan to commercialize AnduinOS. Truthfully, I haven't thoroughly considered these issues. It's not my main job, and I don't plan to rely on it for a living. Each month, I dedicate only a few hours to maintaining it. Perhaps in the future, I might consider providing enterprise solutions based on AnduinOS, but I won't compromise its original simplicity. It has always been about providing myself with a comfortably themed Ubuntu."

In our coverage of the AnduinOS 1.3 release last week, one commenter pointed out that the distro is from China. For some, this will raise issues, but Anduin Xue addressed this in his blog post, too, saying that the source code is available to the public. For this reason, he told lacing the operating system with backdoors for the Chinese government would be "irrational and easily exposed." For those worried that the distribution may be abandoned, Anduin Xue said that he intends to continue supporting it and may even maintain it full-time if sponsorship or corporate cooperation emerges.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's accelerated Android release cycle will soon deliver a new version of the software, and it might look quite different from what you'd expect. Amid rumors of a major UI overhaul, Google seems to have accidentally published a blog post detailing "Material 3 Expressive," which we expect to see revealed at I/O later this month. Google quickly removed the post from its design site, but not before the Internet Archive saved it.

It has been a few years since Google introduced any major changes to its Material theming, but the design team wasn't just sitting idly this whole time. According to the leaked blog post, Google has spent the past three years working on a more emotionally engaging vision for Android design. While the original Material Design did an admirable job of leveraging colors and consistent theming, it could make apps look too similar. The answer to that, apparently, is Material 3 Expressive.

Google says this is "the most-researched update to Google's design system, ever." The effort reportedly included 46 separate studies with hundreds of sample designs. The team showed these designs to more than 18,000 study participants to understand how the user experience would work. In these studies, the design team used a variety of metrics, including the following:
- Eye tracking: Analyzing where users focus their attention
- Surveys and focus groups: Gauging emotional responses to different designs
- Experiments: Gathering sentiment and preferences
- Usability: Seeing how quickly participants could understand and use an interface "The result of all this is an interface that appears much more varied than the previous Material Design," writes Ars.

You can check out 9to5Google's article, which preserved many of the blog post's visuals before they were removed.

A Dartmouth College associate professor of Japanese literature and culture became a narrative consultant for Ubisoft's game Assassin's Creed Shadow (which launched in March). Sachi Schmidt-Hori's job "involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters," writes the Associated Press.

But when a trailer was released in May of 2024, some reacted to a game character named Yasuke who was a Black African samurai, according to the article, "with gamers criticizing his inclusion as 'wokeness' run amok". And they directed the blame at Schmidt-Hori: Gamers quickly zeroed in Schmidt-Hori, attacking her in online forums, posting bogus reviews of her scholarly work and flooding her inbox with profanity. Many drew attention to her academic research into gender and sexuality. Some tracked down her husband's name and ridiculed him, too. [One Reddit user described Schmidt-Hori as a "sexual degenerate who hate humanity because no man want her," while another called her a "professional woke social-justice warrior" who confirmed "fake history for Ubisoft."] Learning Yasuke was based on a real person did little to assuage critics. Asian men in particular argued Schmidt-Hori was trying to erase them, even though her role involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters.

Ubisoft told her to ignore the harassment, as did her friends. Instead, she drew inspiration from the late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis. "I decided to cause 'good trouble,'" she said. "I refused to ignore." Schmidt-Hori began replying to some of the angry emails, asking the senders why they were mad at her and inviting them to speak face-to-face via Zoom. She wrote to an influencer who opposes diversity, equity and inclusion principles and had written about her, asking him if he intended to inspire the death threats she was getting. "If somebody said to your wife what people are saying to me, you wouldn't like it, would you?" she asked. The writer didn't reply, but he did take down the negative article about Schmidt-Hori.

Others apologized. "It truly destroyed me knowing that you had to suffer and cancel your class and received hate from horrible people," one man wrote. "I feel somehow that you are part of my family, and I regret it. I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart." Anik Talukder, a 28-year-old south Asian man living in the United Kingdom, said he apologized at least 10 times to Schmidt-Hori after accepting her Zoom invitation to discuss his Reddit post about her... He was shocked the professor reached out to him and hesitant to speak to her at first. But they ended up having a thoughtful conversation about the lack of Asian representation in Western media and have stayed in touch ever since. "I learned a massive lesson," he said. "I shouldn't have made this person a target for no reason whatsoever."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Facebook's loosening of its content moderation standards early this year got lots of attention and criticism. But a new study suggests that it might matter less what is taken down than when. The research finds that Facebook posts removed for violating standards or other reasons have already been seen by at least three-quarters of the people who would be predicted to ever see them.

"Content takedowns on Facebook just don't matter all that much, because of how long they take to happen," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Social media platforms generally measure how many bad posts they have taken down as an indication of their efforts to suppress harmful or illegal material. The researchers advocate a new metric: How many people were prevented from seeing a bad post by Facebook taking it down...?

"Removed content we saw was mostly garden-variety spam — ads for financial scams, [multilevel marketing] schemes, that kind of thing," Edelson said... The new research is a reminder that platforms inadvertently host lots of posts that everyone agrees are bad.

Finland has passed legislation to restrict the use of phones and other mobile devices during the school day amid fears over their impact on student wellbeing and learning. From a report: Under the changes, which were approved by the Finnish parliament on Tuesday and will come into effect on 1 August, mobile devices will be heavily restricted during lesson times. Pupils will be allowed to use them only with the teacher's permission for healthcare or learning purposes.

Finland is the latest European country to impose legal restrictions on the use of phones and other mobile devices in schools amid growing evidence of their impact on children and young people, including attention and self-esteem. Earlier this year, Denmark said it would ban mobile phones from all schools. The chair of the country's wellbeing commission, Rasmus Meyer, told the Guardian the measure was necessary to stop schools from being "colonised by digital platforms" and urged the rest of Europe to follow suit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says a $254 billion state budget deal has been reached, including a "bell-to-bell" school cellphone ban. [...] The distraction-free policy would take effect next school year, making New York the largest state in the country with a "bell-to-bell" cellphone ban. Hochul says the plan will help protect children from addictive technology and improve their mental health. The New York State United Teachers union also came out in support of the ban, saying "we are at a crisis point."

The governor previously outlined the proposal back in January, saying it would ban the use of smartphones and other internet-enabled devices on school grounds during the school day. That includes classroom time, lunch and study hall periods. "A bell-to-bell ban, morning until the day is over, is not going to hurt your kids. It's going to help them emerge with stronger mental health and resiliency," she told CBS News New York at the time.

Hochul said the ban would include smartphones and other personal "smart" devices, like smartwatches. Exemptions could be made if a student requires a device to manage a medical condition or for translation purposes. Cellphones that don't have internet capability and devices that are provided by the school for lesson plans would still be allowed. The proposal would let individual schools come up with their own ways to implement the ban and store the devices, and schools would be able to decide whether to have students leave them in things like pouches, lockers or cubbies. It would also require schools to make sure parents have a way to contact their children during the day, if needed. "Protecting our communities requires more than streets where people feel safe. We need classrooms where young minds can flourish, and that means eliminating once and for all the digital distractions that steal our kids' attention," the governor said, adding, "We protected our kids before from cigarettes, alcohol and drunk driving, and now, we're protecting them from addictive technology designed to hijack their attention."

"The U.S. and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives," reports It's FOSS News: This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post... Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is...

Not all models from their laptop lineup, like ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, etc., feature an option to get Linux pre-installed during the checkout process. Luckily, there is an easy way to filter through the numerous laptops. Just go to the laptops section (U.S.) on the Lenovo website and turn on the "Operating System" filter under the Filter by specs sidebar menu.
The article end with an embedded YouTube video showing a VCR playing a videotape of a 1999 local TV news report... about the legendary "Windows Refund Day" protests.

Slashdot ran numerous stories about the event — including one by Jon Katz...

"A group of researchers says it has identified a hidden reason we use Google for nearly all web searches," reports the Washington Post. "We've never given other options a real shot." Their research experiment suggests that Google is overwhelmingly popular partly because we believe it's the best, whether that's true or not. It's like a preference for your favorite soda. And their research suggested that our mass devotion to googling can be altered with habit-changing techniques, including by bribing people to try search alternatives to see what they are like...

[A] group of academics — from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT — designed a novel experiment to try to figure out what might shake up Google's popularity. They recruited nearly 2,500 participants and remotely monitored their web searches on computers for months. The core of the experiment was paying some participants — most received $10 — to use Bing rather than Google for two weeks. After that period, the money stopped, and the participants had to pick either Bing or Google. The vast majority in the group of people who were paid to use Bing for 14 days chose to go back to Google once the payments stopped, suggesting a strong preference for Google even after trying an alternative. But a healthy number in that group — about 22 percent — chose Bing and were still using it many weeks later.
"I realized Bing was not as bad as I thought it was...." one study participant said — which an assistant professor in business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania says is a nice summation of the study's findings.

"The researchers did not test other search engines," the article notes. But it also points out that more importantly: the research caught the attention of some government officials: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D), who is leading the group of states that sued Google alongside the Justice Department, said the research helped inspire a demand by the states to fix Google's search monopoly. They asked a judge to require Google to bankroll a consumer information campaign about web search alternatives, including "short-term incentive payments."
On the basis of that, the article suggests "you could soon be paid to try Microsoft Bing or another alternative."

And in the meantime, the reporter writes, "I encourage you to join me in a two-week (unpaid) experiment mirroring the research: Change your standard search engine to something other than Google and see whether you like it. (And drop me a line to let me know how it went.) I'm going with DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused web search engine that uses Bing's technology."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The XPrize Foundation today announced the winners of its four-year, $100 million XPrize competition in carbon removal. The contest is one of dozens hosted by the foundation in its 20-year effort to encourage technological development. Contestants in the carbon removal XPrize had to demonstrate ways to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans and sequester it sustainably.

Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup developing a sequestration technique called enhanced rock weathering, won the grand prize of $50 million. The company spreads crushed basalt on small farms in India and Africa. The silica-rich volcanic rock improves the quality of the soil for the crops but also helps remove carbon dioxide from the air. It does this by reacting with dissolved CO2 in the soil's water, turning it into bicarbonate ions and preventing it from returning to the atmosphere.

More than a dozen organizations globally are developing enhanced rock weathering approaches at an industrial scale, but Mati's tech-heavy verification and software platform caught the XPrize judges' attention. "On the one hand, they're moving rocks around in trucks—that's not very techy. But when we looked under the hood... what we saw was a very impressive data-collection exercise," says Michael Leitch, XPrize's technical lead for the competition. Here's a list of the runners-up:

- Paris-based NetZero won $15 million for turning agricultural waste into biochar through pyrolysis, a method that locks carbon into a stable, solid form.
- Houston-based Vaulted Deep won $8 million for geologically sequestering carbon-rich organic waste by injecting it deep underground.
- London-based Undo Carbon won $5 million for its enhanced rock weathering approach, spreading silicate minerals to speed up natural carbon removal.

Additionally, Project Hajar and Planetary Technologies each received $1 million honorary XFactor prizes, recognizing their promising work in direct air capture and ocean carbon removal, despite not meeting the competition's 1,000-tonne removal threshold.

Offices nationwide are ditching harsh fluorescent lighting in favor of advanced systems designed to improve cognitive function and entice remote workers back to physical workplaces. Companies are investing in circadian-tuned lighting that adjusts intensity and color temperature throughout the day to mimic natural light patterns, syncing with employees' biological rhythms, according to WSJ.

The technology arsenal includes faux skylights displaying virtual suns and moons, AI-controlled self-tinting windows, and customizable lighting zones that can be adjusted via remote control. Research suggests these innovations may improve brain function during tasks requiring sustained attention. "We've known for a long time that natural light is better and makes people feel better," says Peter Cappelli, professor at Wharton School. The innovations stem from discoveries in the early 2000s of photosensitive retinal cells that affect biology independent of vision. Industry specialists report a "huge uptick in requests," though implementation adds 20-30% to project costs, potentially slowing mainstream adoption.

Nature has published an analysis of the 21st century's most-cited scientific papers, revealing a surprising pattern: breakthrough discoveries like mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, and gravitational waves don't make the list. Instead, a 2016 Microsoft paper on "deep residual learning" networks claims the top spot, with citations ranging from 103,756 to 254,074 depending on the database.

The list overwhelmingly features methodology papers and software tools rather than groundbreaking discoveries. AI research dominates with four papers in the top ten, including Google's 2017 "Attention is all you need" paper that underpins modern language models.

The second-most-cited paper -- a 2001 guide for analyzing gene expression data -- was explicitly created to be cited after journal reviewers rejected references to a technical manual. As sociologist Misha Teplitskiy noted, "Scientists say they value methods, theory and empirical discoveries, but in practice the methods get cited more."

"Researchers say that a person's intelligence plays a bigger role in their computer proficiency than previously believed," writes SciTechDaily, "so much so that practice alone may not be enough to ensure ease of use."

A new study has found that general cognitive abilities, such as perception, reasoning, and memory, are more important than previously believed in determining a person's ability to perform everyday tasks on a computer... "It is clear that differences between individuals cannot be eliminated simply by means of training," says Antti Oulasvirta [a professor at Finland's Aalto University who conducted extensive human-computer interaction research with his team and the University of Helsinki Department of Psychology]. "In the future, user interfaces need to be streamlined for simpler use. This age-old goal has been forgotten at some point, and awkwardly designed interfaces have become a driver for the digital divide.

"We cannot promote a deeper and more equal use of computers in society unless we solve this basic problem," Oulasvirta says...

This is the first-ever study to measure users' actual ability to perform daily tasks on a PC, as previous studies have relied on participants self-assessing their abilities via questionnaires... "The study revealed that, in particular, working memory, attention, and executive functions stand out as the key abilities. When using a computer, you must determine the order in which things are done and keep in mind what has already been done. A purely mathematical or logical ability does not help in the same way," says university lecturer Viljami Salmela [from the University of Helsinki].
"Our results suggest that contemporary user interfaces are getting so complex that their design is starting to affect inclusivity," their paper concludes, saying that it ultimately raises a question. "How can we design user interfaces to decrease the role of cognitive abilities."

For the second time, President Trump has extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by 75 days. The TikTok deal "requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed," said Trump in a post on his Truth Social platform. The extension will "keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days."

"We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!)," Trump added. CNBC reports: ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. government, the company told CNBC, adding that any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law. "An agreement has not been executed," a spokesperson for ByteDance said in a statement. "There are key matters to be resolved." Before Trump's decision, ByteDance faced an April 5 deadline to carry out a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok's U.S. business as required by a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024.

ByteDance's original deadline to sell TikTok was on Jan. 19, but Trump signed an executive order when he took office the next day that gave the company 75 more days to make a deal. Although the law would penalize internet service providers and app store owners like Apple and Google for hosting and providing services to TikTok in the U.S., Trump's executive order instructed the attorney general to not enforce it. "This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security!," Trump said in the Truth Social post. "We do not want TikTok to 'go dark.' We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

Air conditioning will contribute more to rising global energy demand than data centers through 2030, according to an International Energy Agency. While attention has focused on computing power consumption, the IEA projects data centers will account for less than 10% of increased energy demand by 2030, significantly less than space cooling requirements. Global cooling degree days, a measure of air conditioning need, were 6% higher in 2024 than 2023 and 20% above the long-term average for the first two decades of the century.

China, India and the United States saw particularly sharp increases. Air conditioning represented 7% of global electricity consumption in 2022, with some U.S. regions reporting that cooling can comprise over 70% of residential energy use during peak periods. The number of air conditioning units worldwide could nearly triple from fewer than 2 billion in 2016 to approximately 6 billion by 2050, creating a growing challenge for power grids.

Some scientists believe life on earth originated in organic matter in earth's bodies of water more than 3.5 billion years ago," reports CNN. "But where did that organic material come from...?"

Maybe electrical energy sparked the beginnings of life on earth — just like in Frankenstein: Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth's oceans and spontaneously produced the organic molecules. Now, new research published March 14 in the journal Science Advances suggests that fizzes of barely visible "microlightning," generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have been potent enough to cook up amino acids from inorganic material.

Amino acids — organic molecules that combine to form proteins — are life's most basic building blocks and would have been the first step toward the evolution of life... For animo acids to form, they need nitrogen atoms that can bond with carbon. Freeing up atoms from nitrogen gas requires severing powerful molecular bonds and takes an enormous amount of energy, according to astrobiologist and geobiologist Dr. Amy J. Williams [an associate professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Florida who was not involved in the research]. "Lightning, or in this case, microlightning, has the energy to break molecular bonds and therefore facilitate the generation of new molecules that are critical to the origin of life on Earth," Williams told CNN in an email...

For the new study, scientists revisited the 1953 experiments but directed their attention toward electrical activity on a smaller scale, said senior study author Dr. Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California. Zare and his colleagues looked at electricity exchange between charged water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns....) The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist, using a high-speed camera to capture faint flashes of microlightning in the vapor. When they examined the bulb's contents, they found organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds. These included the amino acid glycine and uracil, a nucleotide base in RNA... "What we have done, for the first time, is we have seen that little droplets, when they're formed from water, actually emit light and get this spark," Zare said. "That's new. And that spark causes all types of chemical transformations...."

Even on a volatile Earth billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life — a fact that has cast doubt on such theories in the past, Zare said. Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.
"We propose," Zare told CNN, "that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm has reportedly filed secret complaints against Arm with the European Commission, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Qualcomm argues that Arm's open licensing approach helped build a robust hardware and software ecosystem. However, this ecosystem is under threat now as Arm moves to restrict that access to benefit its chip design business, namely compute subsystems (CSS) reference designs for client and datacenter processors and custom silicon based on CSS for large-scale clients.

Qualcomm has presented its case to the EC, U.S. FTC, and Korea FTC behind closed doors and through formal filings, so it does not comment on the matter now. Arm rejected the accusations, stating that it is committed to innovation, competition, and upholding contract terms. The company called Qualcomm's move an attempt to shift attention from a wider commercial dispute between the two companies and use regulatory pressure for its benefit.

Indeed, the antitrust complaints align with Qualcomm's arguments in a recent legal clash with Arm in Delaware. Qualcomm won that trial, as the court ruled that the company did not break the terms of its architecture license agreement (ALA) and technology license agreement (TLA) by acquiring Nuvia and using its IP in its Snapdragon X processors for client PCs. Arm said it would seek a retrial. However, Qualcomm seems to want to ensure that it will have access to Arm's instruction set architecture and technologies by filing complaints with antitrust regulators.

Across high-income countries, humans' ability to reason and solve problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and declined since. Despite no changes in fundamental brain biology, test scores for both teenagers and adults show deteriorating performance in reading, mathematics and science. In an eye-opening statistic, 25% of adults in high-income countries now struggle to "use mathematical reasoning when reviewing statements" -- rising to 35% in the US.

This cognitive decline coincides with a fundamental shift in our relationship with information. Americans reading books has fallen below 50%, while difficulty thinking and concentrating among 18-year-olds has climbed sharply since the mid-2010s. The timing points to our changing digital habits: a transition from finite web pages to infinite feeds, from active browsing to passive consumption, and from focused attention to constant context-switching.

Research shows that intentional use of digital technologies can be beneficial, but the passive consumption dominating recent years impairs verbal processing, attention, working memory and self-regulation.

Some of the cited research in the story:
New PIAAC results show declining literacy and increasing inequality in many European countries â" Better adult learning is necessary;
Have attention spans been declining?;
Short- and long-term effects of passive and active screen time on young children's phonological memory;
Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance.

An anonymous reader shared this article from TechCrunch: Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving.

CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted fresh attention on Friday night, after she posted about it on Bluesky. Some users reacted with alarm to the company's plans, which they saw as a reversal of Bluesky's previous insistence that it won't sell user data to advertisers and won't train AI on user posts.... Graber replied that generative AI companies are "already scraping public data from across the web," including from Bluesky, since "everything on Bluesky is public like a website is public." So she said Bluesky is trying to create a "new standard" to govern that scraping, similar to the robots.txt file that websites use to communicate their permissions to web crawlers...

If a user indicates that they don't want their data used to train generative AI, the proposal says, "Companies and research teams building AI training sets are expected to respect this intent when they see it, either when scraping websites, or doing bulk transfers using the protocol itself."
Over on Threads someone had a different wish for our AI-enabled future. "I want to be able to conversationally chat to my feed algorithm. To be able to explain to it the types of content I want to see, and what I don't want to see. I want this to be an ongoing conversation as it refines what it shows me, or my interests change."

"Yeah I want this too," posted top Instagram/Threads executive Adam Mosseri, who said he'd talked about the idea with VC Sam Lessin. "There's a ways to go before we can do this at scale, but I think it'll happen eventually."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised a few eyebrows on Monday after suggesting that advanced AI models might someday be provided with the ability to push a "button" to quit tasks they might find unpleasant. Amodei made the provocative remarks during an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledging that the idea "sounds crazy."

"So this is -- this is another one of those topics that's going to make me sound completely insane," Amodei said during the interview. "I think we should at least consider the question of, if we are building these systems and they do all kinds of things like humans as well as humans, and seem to have a lot of the same cognitive capacities, if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, maybe it's a duck."

Amodei's comments came in response to an audience question from data scientist Carmem Domingues about Anthropic's late-2024 hiring of AI welfare researcher Kyle Fish "to look at, you know, sentience or lack of thereof of future AI models, and whether they might deserve moral consideration and protections in the future." Fish currently investigates the highly contentious topic of whether AI models could possess sentience or otherwise merit moral consideration. "So, something we're thinking about starting to deploy is, you know, when we deploy our models in their deployment environments, just giving the model a button that says, 'I quit this job,' that the model can press, right?" Amodei said. "It's just some kind of very basic, you know, preference framework, where you say if, hypothesizing the model did have experience and that it hated the job enough, giving it the ability to press the button, 'I quit this job.' If you find the models pressing this button a lot for things that are really unpleasant, you know, maybe you should -- it doesn't mean you're convinced -- but maybe you should pay some attention to it."

Amodei's comments drew immediate skepticism on X and Reddit.