Welcome to the first edition of the Digital Minds Newsletter, collating all the latest news and research on digital minds, AI consciousness, and moral status. Our aim is to help you stay on top of the most important developments in this emerging field. In each issue, we will share a curated overview of key research papers, organizational updates, funding calls, public debates, media coverage, and events related to digital minds. We want this to be useful for people already working on digital minds as well as newcomers to the topic. This first issue looks back at 2025 and reviews developments relevant to digital minds. We plan to release multiple editions per year. If you find this useful, please consider subscribing, sharing it with others, and sending us suggestions or corrections to digitalminds@substack.com. – Bradford, Lucius, and Will In this issue: 1. Highlights 2. Field Development 3. Opportunities 4. Selected Reading, Watching, & Listening 5. Press & Public Discourse 6. A Deeper Dive by Area Brain Waves, Generated by Gemini 1. Highlights In 2025, the idea of digital minds shifted from a niche research topic to one taken seriously by a growing number of researchers, AI developers, and philanthropic funders. Questions about real or perceived AI consciousness and moral status appeared regularly in tech reporting, academic discussions, and public discourse. Anthropic’s early steps on model welfare Following their support for the 2024 report “Taking AI Welfare Seriously”, Anthropic expanded its model welfare efforts in 2025 and hired Kyle Fish as an AI welfare researcher. Fish discussed the topic and his work in an 80,000 Hours interview. Anthropic leadership is taking the issue of AI welfare seriously. CEO Dario Amodei drew attention to the relevance of model interpretability to model welfare and mentioned model exit rights at the council on foreign relations. Several of the year’s most notable developments came from Anthropic: they facilita