That's my take as well.

I think this Anthropic fellow is too much of a psychopath to understand that there's other reasons to ponder the question of consciousness, than to try to upsell a chatbot as a slave, and so he can't understand that it would actually be very bad for him if a bunch of normies were told, with full weight of divine authority, that these things are conscious. I mean, maybe not civil war level bad, but worse than PETA on your ass level bad for sure.

And that is to me very disturbing. He can't even imagine that a reaction to "this is a slave" could be anything other than "shut up and take my money".