I may have overreacted, but jumping from "we should probably ban this research preemptively because it might pose difficult questions later" to comparisons to Unit 731 when someone disagreed, reminded me of the way Anthropic pushes their belief that Claude is conscious onto everyone with "evidence" of questionable value and even when there are many questions they haven't bothered to answer about such a claim. Plus, they do this despite various features we generally associate with conscious experience that current gen LLMs lack.

Given the complexity of behavior observed in nature that doesn't require conscious experience, yet is more advanced than what we can achieve in circuitry, I think it would be too early to close off this area of research.