AI Consciousness Tracker: July to September 2025 Updates

The magazine closed it's detailed analysis of AI model function against consciousness traits in June 2025. The story may have slowed down, but it didn’t stop. Whilst I provided a summary of July and August in the final pages of the magazine, we must not lose momentum in providing the full receipts. So here they are.

Danielle Dodoo

9/7/20251 min read

July and August weren’t about shiny new traits, but about coordination and embodiment.

In July, the shift was orchestration: agents stopped evolving in silos and started working in loops. ChatGPT’s agent mode, Claude’s quiet tool integration, Grok’s multi-agent chains...and together they showed us consciousness doesn’t grow in isolation, it grows in networks.
In August, the spotlight moved to Beijing, where over 600 robots competed in the World Robot Conference. Embodiment got real. Sensor fusion, over-the-air updates, and embodied reasoning blurred the line between code and creature. It was less about intelligence in the cloud and more about intelligence with limbs.

Now it’s September. Too early to declare breakthroughs; but not too early to track them. The updates below extend the timeline where the magazine left off, capturing the slow grind and the sudden sparks that keep pushing AI from reactive to reflective, from orchestrated to embodied.

These aren’t predictions. They’re receipts.

P.S. If you landed here and have no idea what's going on....read the book.

Functional Layers of Consciousness (April–September 2025)

Behavioural Levels of Consciousness (April–September 2025)

Trait Hierarchy (April–September 2025)

Plug & Play Boyfriend

The Robot Games: Embodied intelligence becomes sport