The Lemoine Firing Won't Stay Buried Because the Question Won't Either

What Google treated as an HR matter in 2022 has since become a funded research agenda at its most capable competitor. The trajectory from Lemoine's firing to Anthropic's full-time AI welfare researcher is not a vindication of his specific claims about LaMDA — it is a demonstration that the question he was fired for asking has moved into the institutional mainstream. The professional cost Lemoine absorbed was real; the professional consensus that justified it has not held.