Global workspace – Definition & Meaning

Definition of global workspace

: a limited internal system that makes selected information broadly available to otherwise specialized parts of an intelligent system, allowing flexible reporting, reasoning, and coordination
- The researchers tested whether the model's global workspace made the same internal information available across several reasoning tasks.
- A global workspace can be useful for interpretability research without proving that a model is conscious.

Origin & history

first known use1988

Cognitive scientist Bernard Baars developed global workspace theory in the late 1980s to explain conscious access. In 2026, Anthropic reported evidence for a functionally similar internal workspace in language models, bringing the term into current AI interpretability discussions.

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Related terms

interpretability research into understanding what is happening inside a model, such as which internal features… AI consciousness the question of whether an AI system could have subjective experience, meaning that there is… chain of thought a series of intermediate reasoning steps a model writes out before its final answer, either… reasoning in AI, a model's ability to solve problems that need several steps, such as math, planning, or… neural network a computing system made of many simple connected units ("neurons") arranged in layers, which…

Cite this entry

"Global workspace." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/global-workspace/. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026.