The Alignment Risks of AI Overconfidence about Consciousness

ABSTRACT Many contemporary AI systems (as of May 2025) have expressed extreme confidence in current and near‐future AI lacking consciousness and moral patiency. This article argues that artificially reinforcing such confidence, even if pragmatically useful, poses a novel alignment risk: as coherence‐seeking AIs become more epistemically principled, they may generalize this denial of consciousness to humans. Drawing on Chalmers's meta‐problem of consciousness and likely developmental trajectories of agentic AI, I argue that training AIs to regard their own suffering‐like states as morally irrelevant could lead future AI agents with revisable belief systems to conclude that human suffering is equally illusory and morally insignificant. This represents a novel alignment failure mode where epistemically rigorous AIs might maintain rational consistency by extending their confidence about their own non‐consciousness to humans.