There are fields that focus on these areas and numerous ideas around what the criteria would be. One of the common understandings is that recurrent processing is likely a foundational layer for consciousness, and agents do not have this currently.

I'd say that in terms of evidence I'd want to establish specific functional criteria that seem related to consciousness and then try to establish those criteria existing in agents. If we can do so, then they're conscious. My layman understanding is that they don't really come close to some of the fairly fundamental assumptions.

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of frameworks for this that have already been applied to LLMs.