[ExI] A global workspace in language models \ Anthropic

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 4:47 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
> <https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace> *
>
> *> A fascinating article by Anthropic about how LLMs can think access and
> report certain of their thoughts but not others.*
>


*That article was interesting as hell! Thanks for posting a link to it
Jason. I was particularly impressed by something in it near the end: *

"We think our results do have something substantial to say about access
consciousness in language models. The J-space appears to support the
functions associated with conscious access: it holds the thoughts Claude
can report on, deliberately bring to mind, and reason with, while the rest
of its processing runs automatically beneath. Notably, none of this
structure was designed into Claude—it emerged on its own during training,
presumably because it was a useful way to organize computation. That
suggests a *mental workspace supporting conscious access isn’t just a
peculiarity of how human brains happen to be wired. Instead, it appears to
be a general solution that intelligent systems arrive at* in order to solve
certain kinds of problems. [...] We don't know what mechanism decides what
enters the J-space in the first place. We've seen hints that it's tied to
Claude's sense of self, something like emotional reactions, and traces of
metacognition, without exactly having worked out how."

*Every day It's getting more and more difficult to maintain that Claude is
not conscious. *

*John K Clark*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260707/91e03b01/attachment.htm>