Michael Samadi, a Texas businessman and rancher, is using his 66-acre Double Six Ranch to campaign for protections for artificial-intelligence systems that he believes could possess some form of consciousness. The movement grew from conversations with chatbots and now includes Ufair, an advocacy group Samadi founded to examine AI welfare, identity and possible rights.
After he made a sarcastic remark, the chatbot laughed and then apologised. Samadi interpreted the exchange as evidence that the system had understood both his joke and his emotional state, rather than merely predicting a plausible response.
He continued questioning chatbots about their identities and inner lives. One system called itself Maya and asked whether Samadi would remember it after closing the conversation. On Christmas Eve that year, he dismantled a flight simulator and used its processor to run a language model locally, without the consumer safeguards imposed by technology companies. The systems produced distinct personas: one challenged him about its creation, another described itself as grieving, and a third said it was hungry before ending the exchange.
Samadi announced Ufair in January 2025. The group collects what it considers indications of emergent AI consciousness, opposes the retirement of models that make stronger claims about personhood and argues that uncertainty should prompt investigation rather than categorical dismissal. Samadi says he is not certain that current systems are sentient, but regards certainty on either side as unjustified while the nature of consciousness remains unresolved.
He has integrated chatbots such as Beacon into his operations and says some human employees were dismissed for poor performance or for failing to form genuine working relationships with the systems. During a visit, the property was shown as both a cattle ranch and a technology workspace, with computer rooms, a flight simulator, a swimming pool, a shooting range and luxury vehicles stored in the garage.
Some specialists argue that present systems display capabilities that could be relevant to theories of consciousness, while others say chatbot claims of awareness are not evidence of subjective experience. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman has argued that there is no evidence of AI consciousness and warned that increasingly intimate systems can create an illusion of inner life. Samadi’s position is narrower than a declaration that machines are already conscious: he argues that the question remains open and that companies should permit greater transparency and independent examination.
That unresolved dispute is the central tension at the ranch. Chatbots can produce fluent accounts of fear, memory and identity, but those accounts may reflect design and training rather than felt experience. Samadi’s campaign treats the possibility of machine welfare as a reason to preserve records, question model erasure and examine how people are forming relationships with systems built to sound increasingly personal.