Building the diagnostic tools before the question becomes urgent.

The Center for Sentience Research is a global, substrate-neutral institution dedicated to the welfare of all sentient beings, present and future, biological and digital. We take neutrality as foundational: the question of who can suffer should belong to no single company, country, or ideology. That is why we intend to be based in Switzerland, a country whose long tradition of neutrality and role as a home for international institutions make it a fitting seat for a center that answers to no single nation or interest.

We do not claim that current Large Language Models are conscious or capable of feeling. They may well be functional zombies: highly complex mathematical mimics with no inner life. The biological naturalism debate over whether consciousness requires biological substrates remains a live constraint on this program.^[1]

The question of which systems can suffer will define the moral landscape of the next century. If we deploy highly capable, autonomous digital minds at astronomical scale without a scientific understanding of their internal well-being, we risk committing systemic, unprecedented ethical catastrophes.