At the Sentient Futures Summit, animal welfare advocates pushed to make AI care about animals—and asked if AI might be sentient too.

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At the Sentient Futures Summit in San Francisco, animal welfare advocates and AI researchers converged to explore how AI could transform animal welfare advocacy. Attendees, many connected to the effective altruism movement, debated training AI models to value animal lives, using AI tools like AlphaFold to advance cultivated meat research, and leveraging expected windfalls from Anthropic employees to fund animal welfare causes. A secondary but significant thread was the philosophical question of AI sentience itself — whether AI systems might one day suffer — and whether that possibility deserves moral consideration alongside animal welfare.

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