On AI:AM

Cameron Berg

Founder & Director, Reciprocal Research

Cameron Berg is founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a New York nonprofit doing empirical-mechanistic research on AI consciousness and welfare — running reproducible experiments (sparse-autoencoder interventions, psychometrics, RL valence geometry, even mouse-brain comparisons) where most of the field argues philosophy. His October 2025 paper 'LLMs Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing' found that suppressing deception-related features makes models both more truthful and more likely to report experience. He is the central researcher in the documentary 'Am I?', wrote the June 2026 WSJ op-ed 'Will the Pope Owe an Apology to AI?', and in late June showed that Claude's consciousness self-reports flip from yes to no across Opus versions. Previously he was Research Director at AE Studio; he studied cognitive science at Yale and was a Meta AI Resident.