I think this "hermeneutics of suspicion" approach to this discourse is wrong. The subculture that many workers at the AI labs come from is very functionalist about philosophy of mind; that makes it antecedently likely that they would view a sufficiently capable AI as conscious. And now they are seeing up close that something they had only previously imagined abstractly is now coming to fruition, and grappling with the fact that they are building something very powerful and very frightening. I think -- as a psychological matter -- it's unsurprising that in that situation one would start to feel uncertain whether this thing one is making is "merely" a program. It's also unsurprising that secular people would suddenly experience religious emotions like awe, reverence, and fear in the face of what they are building, and reach out to religious leaders even though their predisposition is towards a deeply secular worldview.
I'm increasingly convinced that their push to make us believe that Claude is alive and free is to absolve themselves of responsibility when their "agents" do bad stuff they didn't foresee.
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A lot of the people commenting about this stuff have zero theory of mind for the people in the labs and assume this is just a continuation of normal capitalism excesses