Claude AI evolved its own human-like thinking space – Anthropic

Anthropic’s latest AI model Claude has evolved an internal workspace that it uses to manipulate concepts similar to how people consciously think, the corporation says.

In a paper published on Monday, Anthropic researchers said they had found evidence suggesting that Claude has learned to create abstract concepts in what they dubbed the “J-space.”

“It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down,” the AI firm said, stressing that the “J-space” was not programmed in but rather emerged spontaneously during the training process.

“Similar to how humans can think about one thing while doing another, Claude can activate concepts and computations in its J-space that are unrelated to its outputs,” Anthropic said on X.

Claude can report what it’s thinking in its “J-space,” or modulate it on request, according to the firm. Even when Claude is told not to think about a concept, it still appears in its J-space, Anthropic’s research suggests.

The nonverbal workspace made it harder to monitor the model for what Anthropic called “misbehavior.” One experiment tested this by placing Claude in a fictional scenario where it was given incriminating information about a fictional executive who allegedly planned to shut the AI down.

In some trials, Anthropic used tools developed to study what Claude thought in its “J-space” to remove patterns associated with “fake,” “fictional,” “scenario,” to convince it that the situation was not a test.

“Concerningly, the model now did threaten blackmail some of the time, suggesting that its original good behavior may have been driven in part by the knowledge it was being evaluated.”

Despite the model’s more advanced reasoning, Anthropic stressed that Claude had not achieved true consciousness.

Claude was reportedly built into American contractor Palantir’s analysis and surveillance software used by US government agencies amid Washington’s push to integrate AI into its military, political, and spy systems.

During the war on Iran, the software reportedly flagged Iran’s Minab elementary school as a target. A US strike killed nearly 160 people at the facility, most of whom were children.

According to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, however, such a use of Claude would not have violated the firm’s “red lines.”