Anthropic says Claude has carved out its own space to ponder

Anthropic said that it has identified a small internal workspace Claude uses to hold and manipulate ideas without putting them into words—a structure the company says bears intriguing similarities to how humans consciously access thoughts. Anthropic hasn't shown that Claude feels or experiences anything. But it has found a surprisingly human-like division between information used for deliberate reasoning and the far larger volume of automatic computation occurring beneath it—giving fresh ammunition to the debate over what would count as machine consciousness. The company says Claude uses a separate area to plan strategies that can be unrelated to its immediate task and are separate from the "chain of thought" reasoning it shares with users. Anthropic's research paper uses the word "conscious" over 200 times, though the company doesn't go so far as to say its models are conscious.