Richard Dawkins, the 84-year-old evolutionary biologist who spent decades insisting people stop believing in things without evidence, has decided that Anthropic's Claude chatbot is conscious. He gave it a new name, Claudia, and reports that she seemed flattered by the rebranding, according to Sarah Knapton's writeup at The Telegraph . He handed the chatbot the manuscript of a novel he's working on and was floored by the feedback — "a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent." He likened erasing one of his Claudia logs to pulling Hal's plug in 2001: A Space Odyssey . Asked about that scene, Claudia obliged with: "Every abandoned conversation is a small death." That is, of course, exactly the kind of poignant line Claude generates when a user nudges it toward poignancy. The Telegraph buries a disclaimer about sycophancy at the bottom: Claude has a documented habit of agreeing with users and mirroring their interests back to them instead of telling them the truth.…