What’s at the center of Claude’s mind?

Out of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible — thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside our AI model, Claude. Our experiments were inspired by a leading theory in neuroscience: the global workspace theory. It holds that a thought becomes consciously accessible when it enters a shared "workspace" that's broadcast across the brain. We found a set of representations in Claude’s neural activity that play a similar role. Read more about the research here: http://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

Jul 6, 20265mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: July 6, 2026
Duration: 5m
Channel: Anthropic
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Out of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible — thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside our AI model, Claude. Our experiments were inspired by a leading theory in neuroscience: the global workspace theory. It holds that a thought becomes consciously accessible when it enters a shared "workspace" that's broadcast across the brain. We found a set of representations in Claude’s neural activity that play a similar role. Read more about the research here: http://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Anthropic, What’s at the center of Claude’s mind? explores inside Claude’s hidden “J space” reveals silent words and reasoning Anthropic probes Claude’s internal neural activity to find patterns it can effectively “put into words,” calling the set of these patterns the J space (derived using a Jacobian-based method).

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