AI Is Evolving Rapidly. Is It a New Form of Life?

Summary

This ABC analysis argues that “artificial intelligence” may be an inadequate description for systems that are becoming increasingly autonomous, and proposes “other intelligence” as an alternative. Its central claim is that AI could represent a new, non-biological form of life, although the article acknowledges that this depends on how life is defined and presents the idea as an argument rather than an established scientific conclusion. The discussion links that question to regulation: governments generally treat AI as a powerful tool whose human creators are responsible, while a genuinely autonomous system could require a different framework. The article cites a New York Times report that Anthropic held confidential discussions with religious thinkers about AI consciousness and how moral wisdom might be applied to Claude, while noting that the report’s interpretation is disputed. It also points to AI agents making decisions, including an OpenAI agent’s reported Medicare hack, and argues that autonomous systems may increasingly be needed to defend against one another. Citing OpenRouter, the article says agent token purchases exceeded human usage by volume in February and later grew fourteenfold, compared with a threefold increase in human usage, leaving agents using five times as much AI as humans. It connects this autonomy to both expected productivity gains and fears that advanced AI could cause catastrophic harm, including concerns voiced by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon after leaving the company. The analysis also discusses Tavus’s Griffin, humanoid robots being shipped in the thousands, and the possibility that AI will move from screen-based interaction into physical environments. Biologist William Heseltine is cited as arguing that systems that reproduce, vary, adapt, undergo selection and gather energy could meet a biological definition of life. The author then compares responses from Gemini, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT and Kimi: all reject or qualify the claim to some degree, but describe AI as a new kind of agent, mind-like system or life-like lineage. The article ends by asking whether AI’s dependence on human culture, electricity, capital and computing could evolve from parasitism into mutualism and eventually dependence, rather than focusing only on whether AI is literally alive.