A global workspace in language models \ Anthropic

Anthropic's interpretability team reports an emergent structure inside Claude they call the J-space: a small privileged set of internal representations the model can report on, deliberately steer, and reason with, while grammar and fluent production run independently of it. The research announcement is the readable entry point; the full paper on Transformer Circuits sets out the Jacobian lens technique and the five properties the J-space satisfies -- verbal report, directed control, mediating internal reasoning, flexible computation across contexts, and being a small fraction of total processing. The framing is borrowed deliberately from global workspace theory in cognitive science, and the claim that lands hardest is architectural rather than philosophical: a workspace-like organisation appears to emerge on its own in transformers rather than being designed in. A walkthrough video covers the result at talk pace, and Neuronpedia has the Jacobian lens wired up interactively against Qwen3.6-27B if you want to poke at it yourself. Read it with the interpretability caveat in hand: this is evidence about structure and causal role, not a claim about consciousness.

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