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AI, Animals, & Digital Minds 2025: Retrospective
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Alistair Stewart·Johannes Pichler 🔸·Constance Li·Sentient Futures
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3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
Published on the EA Forum, this retrospective is relevant to AI safety researchers concerned with the moral status of AI systems and the broader question of which entities deserve moral consideration as AI capabilities advance.
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AI safetyAnimal welfareAI governanceAI x AnimalsAnnouncements and updatesArtificial intelligenceArtificial sentienceDigital personEffective animal advocacyEthics of artificial intelligencePostmortems & retrospectivesTransformative artificial intelligence
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Importance: 42/100commentary
Summary
A retrospective review of the 2025 'AI, Animals, & Digital Minds' initiative or conference, examining developments at the intersection of AI and questions of moral patienthood for animals and digital minds. The piece likely surveys progress, key findings, and ongoing challenges in extending moral consideration to non-human and artificial entities.
Key Points
- •Reviews progress in 2025 on questions of moral status for animals and potentially sentient AI systems
- •Addresses the intersection of AI development with animal welfare and digital minds research
- •Likely covers shifts in how the EA/AI safety community thinks about non-human moral patients
- •May assess research priorities and funding directions in this emerging field
- •Reflects on challenges in attributing consciousness or moral patienthood to digital entities
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# AI, Animals, & Digital Minds 2025: Retrospective
By Alistair Stewart, Johannes Pichler 🔸, Constance Li, Sentient Futures
Published: 2025-07-12
**Key takeaway**
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**We need less breadth and more depth. **Much of the early growth and success of the movement at the intersection of AI, animals and digital minds has come from exchanging ideas, people and resources across these fields. We think we are now approaching a point where more specialisation and a greater focus on action will lead to the most valuable outcomes.
Rather not read? Watch a short [highlight video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbWwZBuQLdY) instead.
**Aim**
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The aim of AI, Animals, & Digital Minds (AIADM) 2025 was to bring together leaders in AI and non-human ethics to share ideas, resources and opportunities; and to collaborate on two goals:
1. Using AI to help animals now
2. Making powerful AI go better for all sentient beings, regardless of species or substrate
**Did we achieve our aim?** Yes, we think so!
**Event overview**
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Organised by AI for Animals (now Sentient Futures), AIADM 2025 brought together almost 900 people in person and virtually across three days in May/June:
* Roughly **115** people at our in-person conference on Friday 30th May at University College London – including organisers, volunteers and speakers.
* Over **750** views of our virtual conference, which was a free livestream of most talks in the largest room of the Friday conference on YouTube.
* Up to **60** people at our in-person unconference on Saturday 31st May and Sunday 1st June at the Ambitious Impact office in east London – including organisers, volunteers and speakers.
* Over **20** participants at our virtual unconference, which took place at 4-7pm UTC on Saturday 31st May and Sunday 1st June in the [EA coworking and lounge](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups/MCtKD7oex9jhsAWvD) virtual space on GatherTown.
At the **Friday conference** we had three rooms in use for talks, panels, workshops and meet-ups throughout the day:
At the **weekend in-person unconference**, we had free use of almost the entire Ambitious Impact office with over nine rooms and other areas for participants to meet in. Participants pitched their own sessions – discussions, debates, workshops, talks – and then,
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