Anthropic found a workspace inside Claude where thoughts form before any words appear.

It raises questions about human cognition we could never ask before.

A window into AI may show us the first principles of cognition.

Recently, I posted something about AI that I didn’t expect to write for years, if ever. I admitted that the interior of these systems may not be the empty room I’ve long described. Anthropic has identified what it calls the J-space, a small set of internal patterns that behave like a mental workspace. Concepts take shape there and influence answers without ever appearing in the final text. The researchers can watch a thought form inside the machine before it speaks. I haven’t stopped thinking about that.

Two details stand out to me. First, no one engineered this workspace. It emerged on its own during training. Second, when researchers suppressed the J-space, basic recall survived, but complex reasoning collapsed. Whatever the structure is, it isn’t decoration. And when you remove it, the........

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