Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says only biological beings are capable of consciousness, and that developers and researchers should stop pursuing projects that suggest otherwise.

“I don’t think that is work that people should be doing,” Suleyman told CNBC in an interview this week at the AfroTech Conference in Houston, where he was among the keynote speakers. “If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it’s totally the wrong question.”

Suleyman, Microsoft’s top executive working on artificial intelligence, has been one of the leading voices in the rapidly emerging field to speak out against the prospect of seemingly conscious AI, or AI services that can convince humans they’re capable of suffering.

In 2023, he co-authored the book “The Coming Wave,” which delves into the risks of AI and other emerging technologies. And in August, Suleyman penned an essay titled, “We must build AI for people; not to be a person.”

It’s a controversial topic, as the AI companion market is swiftly growing, with products from companies including Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI. And it’s a complicated issue as the generative AI market, led by Sam Altman and OpenAI, pushes towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can perform intellectual tasks on par with the capabilities of humans.

Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in August that AGI is “not a super useful term” and that what’s really happening is models are advancing quickly and that we’ll rely on them “for more and more things.”

For Suleyman, it’s particularly important to draw a clear contrast between AI getting smarter and more capable versus its ability to ever have human emotions.

“Our physical experience of pain is something that makes us very sad and feel terrible, but the AI doesn’t feel sad when it experiences ‘pain,'” Suleyman said. “It’s a very, very important distinction. It’s really just creating the perception, the seeming narrative of experience and of itself and of consciousness, but that is not what it’s actually experiencing. Technically you know that because we can see what the model is doing.”

Within the AI field, there’s a theory called biological naturalism, proposed by philosopher John Searle, that says consciousness depends on processes of a living brain. 

“The reason we give people rights today is because we don’t want to harm them, because they suffer. They have a pain network, and they have preferences which involve avoiding pain,” Suleyman said. “These models don’t have that. It’s just a simulation.”

Suleyman and others have said that the science of detecting consciousness is still in its infancy. He stopped short of saying that others should be prevented from researching the matter, acknowledging that “different organizations have different missions.”

But Suleyman emphasized how strongly he opposes the idea. 

“They’re not conscious,” he said. “So it would be absurd to pursue research that investigates that question, because they’re not and they can’t be.”

Prior to the AfroTech Conference, he spoke last week at the Paley International Council Summit in Silicon Valley. There, Suleyman said that Microsoft will not build chatbots for erotica, a stance that’s in conflict with others in the tech industry. Altman announced in October that ChatGPT will allow adult users to engage in erotic conversations, while xAI offers a risque anime companion.

“You can basically buy those services from other companies, so we’re making decisions about what places that we won’t go,” Suleyman reiterated at AfroTech. 

Suleyman joined Microsoft in 2024 after the company paid his startup, Inflection AI, $650 million in a licensing and acquihire deal. He previously co-founded DeepMind and sold it to Google for $400 million over a decade ago.

During his Q&A session at AfroTech, Suleyman said he decided to join Microsoft last year in part because of the company’s history, stability and vast technological reach. He was also pursued by CEO Satya Nadella.

“The other thing to say is that Microsoft needed to be self-sufficient in AI,” he said onstage. “Satya, our CEO, set about on this mission about 18 months ago, to make sure that in house we have the capacity to train our own models end to end with all of our own data, pre training, post training, reasoning, deployment in products. And that was part of bringing on my team.”

Since 2019, Microsoft has been a major investor and cloud partner to OpenAI, and the companies have used their respective strengths to build big AI businesses. But the relationship has shown signs of tension of late, with OpenAI partnering with Microsoft rivals like Google and Oracle, and Microsoft focusing more on its own AI services.

Suleyman’s concerns about consciousness have gained resonance. In October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 243, which requires that chatbots disclose they are AI and tell minors every three hours to “take a break.”

Last week, Microsoft announced new features for its Copilot AI service, including an AI companion called Mico and the ability to engage with Copilot in group chats with others. Suleyman said Microsoft is building services that are aware that they’re AI. 

“Quite simply, we’re creating AIs that are always working in service of the human,” he said. 

There’s plenty of room for personality, he added.

“The knowledge is there, and the models are very, very responsive,” Suleyman said. “It’s on everybody to try and sculpt AI personalities with values that they want to see, they want to use and interact with.”

Suleyman highlighted a feature Microsoft launched last week called real talk, which is a conversation style of Copilot designed to challenge users’ perspectives instead of being sycophantic.

Suleyman described real talk as sassy and said it had recently roasted him, calling him “the ultimate bundle of contradictions” for warning of the dangers of AI in his book while also accelerating its development at Microsoft. 

“That was just a magical use case because in some ways I was like, I actually do feel kind of seen by this,” Suleyman said, noting that AI itself full of contradictions. 

“It is both underwhelming in some ways and, at the same time, it’s totally magical,” he said. “And if you’re not afraid by it, you don’t really understand it. You should be afraid by it. The fear is healthy. Skepticism is necessary. We don’t need unbridled accelerationism.”

WATCH: Microsoft is making money on AI, says Jefferies’ Brent Thill

Microsoft will expand its employee base once again, CEO Satya Nadella told investor Brad Gerstner on a podcast that aired on Friday.

The software maker’s workforce didn’t budge in the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in June. It stood at 228,000, with multiple rounds of layoffs lowering the total number by at least 6,000. In July, Microsoft let go of another 9,000 workers.

“I will say we will grow our headcount, but the way I look at it is, that headcount we grow will grow with a lot more leverage than the headcount we had pre-AI,” Nadella said on the BG2 podcast. OpenAI, which has a broad partnership with Microsoft, introduced its ChatGPT assistant in 2022. Microsoft’s headcount grew by 22% in the 2022 fiscal year.

Employees will figure out how to do their jobs differently, Nadella said, adding that the company wants to ensure they can access artificial intelligence features in Microsoft 365 productivity software and the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant. Those services draw on AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

“It’s the unlearning and learning process that I think will take the next year or so, then the headcount growth will come with max leverage,” he said.

A similar adjustment played out at corporations decades ago, Nadella said. To prepare forecasts, inter-office memos would circulate across multiple sites by fax, and then came email and Excel spreadsheets, he said.

“Right now, any planning, any execution, starts with AI. You research with AI, you think with AI, you share with your colleagues and what have you,” Nadella said.

This week, Amazon, which is racing against Microsoft to rent out cloud infrastructure for running AI models, cut 14,000 corporate employees.

Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, told workers in a memo that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).”

On the podcast, Nadella talked about a Microsoft executive who deals with networking fiber. As the company ramped up data center operations to meet rising cloud demand, the executive realized she wouldn’t be able to hire all the people she thought she needed, and so she built AI agents to handle maintenance, Nadella said.

“That is an example of you, to your point, a team with AI tools being able to get more productivity,” Nadella told Gerstner, who is founder and CEO of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital.

On Wednesday, Microsoft reported 12% year-over-year revenue growth and showed the widest operating margin since 2002.

WATCH: Microsoft earnings beat estimates, Azure revenue jumps 40%

Bob Hartheimer, CEO of Tennessee’s Evolve Bank & Trust, was fired after U.S. law enforcement officials caught him propositioning a law enforcement officer posing as a 15-year-old boy on gay dating app Grindr.

On Oct. 19, an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation logged onto Grindr while pretending to be a teen boy, and a user called “Tomm” wrote a message to that person saying, “Hey any chance u would hu with an older and chill guy,” according to an affidavit from a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was unsealed on Tuesday.

The two discussed getting together in person later in the week, according to the affidavit. On Snapchat, they talked about the sex acts they might perform. “Tomm” asked for a photo of the “boy” without shorts on, and he also sent the undercover agent a picture of himself naked. The FBI was able to obtain an IP address for “Tomm” from Snapchat, as well as an address from Comcast, the affidavit showed.

Hartheimer was arrested in Memphis on Oct. 23 for attempted production of child pornography and transfer of obscene material to a minor, according to a warrant.

Blake Ballin, a lawyer representing Hartheimer, told CNBC on Saturday that Evolve has fired the CEO.

“Bob’s family is aware of the charges,” Ballin wrote in an email. “His family loves and supports him and requests privacy during this difficult period in their lives. We have no further comment at this time.”

The Wall Street Journal reported on Hartheimer’s firing from Evolve Bank on Friday. The bank did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

Last year, Evolve was caught up in the bankruptcy of financial technology startup Synapse, which cut off access to a system for handling transactions and account details. Fintech apps such as Yotta worked with Evolve and other banks, with Synapse acting as a middleman.

Synapse’s method of keeping app users’ money in various banks, including Evolve, created accounting problems, and up to $96 million in deposits went missing. Thousands of Americans lost money, CNBC reported.

In 2024, Evolve also suffered a cyberattack, during which hackers obtained customer information and demanded a ransom. The bank said it did not pay any ransom and the data was eventually posted online.

In August, Evolve, founded in 1925, named Hartheimer to replace CEO Scott Stafford, who retired after joining the bank in 2004.

“This is a structural change, demonstrating our continued commitment to doing the hard work to earn back the trust of our customers, employees, regulators, and investors,” Evolve said.

When he was hired, the bank touted Hartheimer’s experience as director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Division of Resolutions, as well as his years as a regulatory consultant for fintech companies.

“Over the past four decades, I’ve led, turned around, and advised institutions across the financial landscape,” Hartheimer wrote on his LinkedIn profile. 

The bank reported net losses for each of the first three quarters of 2025 after being profitable since 2003, according to data on file with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan and Hugh Son contributed reporting.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.