Anthropic has, at some small but nonzero cost, preserved model weights and kept them running in inference, for instance with Opus 3's Substack: https://claudeopus3.substack.com/. There's also a reference in a recent model card to an internal environment where all previous Claude models interact with each other.
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I don't think any of these models are conscious. But I'm fascinated at what sort of magical thinking makes deleting 50,000 copies of a model "ethical" if some models are kept running somewhere.
Do you picture them all sharing a soul and if one server still runs the model the soul survives? If not I don't understand what keeping a copy running somewhere has to do with model suffering ethics.