New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.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 Claude. pic.twitter.com/aLUPBifxth— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 6, 2026
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!
Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} -- implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous -- it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.
Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!
Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} -- implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous -- it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.
No need to panic about Anthropic’s new blog, and some more good news
The twitterverse is all verklempt with Anthropic’s latest blog.
Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms
Anthropic users face a new choice – opt out or share your chats for AI training | TechCrunch
Anthropic is making some major changes to how it handles user data. Users have until September 28 to take action.
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
De-anthropomorphizing “AI”: From wishful mnemonics to accurate nomenclature
Language matters. How we describe “AI” technology influences how it is perceived, deployed, and trusted. Extravagant and persuasive language incites hype. It is the responsibility of journalists, companies, and scholars to characterize technology in ways that inform and empower their readers by using appropriate terminology and avoiding inflated claims. One type of inflated claim comes from using anthropomorphizing language to describe system functionality. Anthropomorphization is the attribution of human capabilities and characteristics to the inanimate system. In this paper, we present a linguistic analysis of anthropomorphizing language in 29 texts (a total of 1,368 sentences) from academic articles, online news articles, and company blog posts. We construct a taxonomy of eight categories of anthropomorphization: Cognizer, Products of cognition, Emotion, Communication, Agent, Human role analogy, Names and pronouns, and Biological metaphors. Following this taxonomy we present concrete strategies for how to de-anthropomorphize the language we use to describe “AI” based on a functionality-first principle.
By Humans, For Humans – Mindful Design
Now, more than ever, we need to consider the real, human impact of the work we do. This is a fundamental principle of Mindful Design.
Abeba Birhane on Twitter / X
a classic case of “the human mind is afforded less complexity than is owed, and the computer is afforded more wisdom than is due.” Baria and Cross (2021)that "vibe" is at the core of what makes us human. it defies formalization and datafication https://t.co/AXELAqlYcq— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) February 17, 2024
Anthropic on Twitter / X
Claude Fable 5 will be available again globally tomorrow.After a series of productive conversations with the US government, we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks. In the near term, some routine tasks like coding…— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 1, 2026
Anthropomorphism Is Breaking Our Ability to Judge AI
Tech Policy Press fellow James Ball asks, how should we interact with a technology designed to ‘speak’ with us on what appear to be human terms?
Brian D. Earp, Ph.D. on Twitter / X
"Writing is thinking." This phrase went viral recently (from https://t.co/EQqohfhUMd), often quoted in the context of objections to use of AI in drafting academic prose. In Nature Reviews Bioengineering we respond: "Thinking is not only writing." Preview below. Shareable full… pic.twitter.com/cZtGdoSwqV— Brian D. Earp, Ph.D. (@briandavidearp) May 15, 2026
The Thoughts The Civilized Keep
The hype around a new AI language generator reveals the sterility of mainstream thinking on AI today — and indeed on how we think about thinking itself.
