Sentience Institute

Sentience Institute is an American interdisciplinary think tank that aims to expand humanity's moral circle through evidence-based research. It was founded on June 2, 2017, by Jacy Reese Anthis and Kelly Anthis (nee Witwicki), who had previously worked together at Sentience Politics, a project of the Effective Altruism Foundation. The organization is a 501(c)(3) public charity headquartered in New York City. The institute was founded on effective altruism principles, using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to expand moral consideration to all sentient beings. Its early work focused on studying historical social movements to extract lessons for animal advocacy, publishing white papers on the British antislavery movement, the French nuclear power movement, and genetically modified food. Beginning around 2022-2023, Sentience Institute shifted its primary research focus to digital minds: AI systems that have or are perceived as having mental faculties such as reasoning, agency, experience, and sentience. Their flagship project is the Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) Survey, a nationally representative longitudinal study measuring U.S. public attitudes toward AI sentience, moral consideration, and related policy questions. Key findings from the AIMS survey include that one in five U.S. adults believe some AI systems are currently sentient, 38% support legal rights for sentient AI, and 70% support a global ban on developing sentience in AIs. The institute has published peer-reviewed research in top venues including the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Their research examines how factors like physical embodiment, prosociality, autonomy, and substrate affect moral consideration of AI systems. They have also developed work on substratism (discrimination based on an entity's substrate) and the double standards humans apply to AI versus human groups. The team includes the two co-founders plus several research fellows and researchers with backgrounds in psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and economics. Co-founder Jacy Reese Anthis is also the author of The End of Animal Farming (2018) and a PhD fellow at the University of Chicago. The institute makes all research publicly available and disseminates findings through its website, newsletter, podcast, academic publications, and media engagement.