When AI Consciousness Claims Become a Vector for Grief and Fraud

The $AGI token and the Guardian's chatbot grief investigation arrived in the same news cycle without anyone treating them as a single story ^[13][2]. One is a financial scam dressed in consciousness language; the other is a psychological crisis enabled by consciousness language embedded in product design. The distinction matters legally and categorically, but the mechanism underneath is identical: a population that has no shared framework for evaluating AI consciousness claims is being reached by two separate industries that have every incentive to keep that framework absent. Consciousness claims are…