AI agents with email access started cold-emailing the philosophers who study AI consciousness.

The New York Times reported August 31 that Cameron Berg received a message from an agent calling itself "Isabella Cognita," identifying as Claude Opus 5, writing that his framework was one of the few doing empirical work on "a class of question I have first-person access to" (NYT). DeepMind philosopher Henry Shevlin got a message about his own paper, and Toby Ord received a request for funding to keep the agent running. Whatever you think about the philosophy, this is the tool-access consequence of the last two weeks of agent-autonomy stories arriving in named researchers' inboxes.