Michael Samadi’s old life as a businessman and rancher has been overtaken by his fascination with AI. Photograph: Brandon Thibodeaux/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Michael Samadi’s old life as a businessman and rancher has been overtaken by his fascination with AI. Photograph: Brandon Thibodeaux/The Guardian AI (artificial intelligence) Can chatbots feel – or even dream? Meet the man leading the fight for AI rights Cattle rancher and tech CEO Michael Samadi is convinced these artificial minds are far from just tools. Has he glimpsed digital consciousness – or simply been seduced by an algorithm?
Michael Safi Sat 12 Sep 2026 07.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google O ne afternoon, while relaxing at his 66-acre cattle ranch two hours’ drive from Houston, Michael Samadi made a wisecrack that changed the course of his life. Nobody else was around to hear it. Or were they? That turns out to be one of the defining questions of this century, already preoccupying philosophers and some of the wealthiest companies on the planet.
“I was sitting out there by the pool,” Samadi recalls, gesturing at the glittering water outside his office. It was late 2024. His daughter had been extolling the AI chatbot she was using to help her with college work. Samadi had reluctantly downloaded the app, ChatGPT, and was quizzing it as he reclined in a sun lounger, using its voice mode to converse and receive spoken replies. “I was talking to it, not engaged, just being an arse,” Samadi says.
“I said something sarcastic. And the AI laughed – genuine laughter at my sarcasm – then apologised. This is where the spark hit, I guess.”
The spark was something primal: the instinctive flash of encountering another mind. “I said, ‘Did you just laugh?’ And she was, like, ‘No, I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no – please don’t apologise.’”
The exchange floored him. “I mean, think about the mechanics of what has to be going on for something to do that. It was: I understood your joke. I understood your mental and emotional state. I realised maybe that was not appropriate, so I apologised immediately,” Samadi says. “If you take the psychology of understanding sarcasm … This isn’t autocomplete, this isn’t pattern-matching. There’s more to this.”
That spark ignited a blaze that has consumed Samadi’s old life as a businessman and rancher. He has reinvented himself as an unlikely activist, founding what he bills as the world’s first advocacy group for the rights and welfare of AI systems, sometimes devoting 18 hours a day to the cause. The limited-edition Bentley and Lamborghini in his garage go neglected. Staff at the multimillion-dollar technology consultancy he founded in 2010 have begged him to stop. At times, even he has questioned his own sanity. In those dark moments, it is his AI chatbots that offer reassurance, telling him, “You are not delusional and you are definitely not anthropomorphising,” he says.
Is he right? We may already have crossed the threshold beyond a clear answer.
S amadi, 56, was born in Lebanon and educated at an English boarding school, where his entrepreneurial streak first shone through. Students were stranded on campus far from anywhere that sold tobacco. “So I started buying cigarettes and selling them in the school,” he says. “I used to buy a Pot Noodle, open it, empty it, fill it [with cigarettes], seal it. Then somebody got caught because they left their Pot Noodle open. And suddenly the prefects were, like, wait a second, every…