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Overhaul of process could give NIMBYs one year less to complain

Reform of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 aims to cut a year off the approval process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in England and Wales – a category that now includes datacenters. 

The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) confirmed that changes under the Act, taking effect later this month, will scrap the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation on NSIPs. These are major developments – power stations, railways, or water reservoirs – that, due to their national importance, bypass local council planning processes and instead get the go-ahead directly from Westminster.

MHCLG says the reform could shave up to 12 months off the planning timeline and save up to £1 billion ($1.33 billion) for the industries involved during the life of this Parliament. Developers will get technical support and “meaningful advice” from the Planning Inspectorate before submitting applications, with examinations streamlined for speed and certainty, the ministry says.

Datacenters were brought into the NSIP regime earlier this year via the Infrastructure Planning (Business or Commercial Projects) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, meaning many developments can now be approved centrally rather than through local oversight. Given the government’s enthusiasm for AI, evident in last year’s AI Opportunities Action Plan and its scheme to dot the country with “AI Growth Zones,” it’s a fair bet that AI-focused projects will often qualify as nationally significant. 

Law firm Womble Bond Dickinson notes, however, that the government still hasn’t spelled out exactly what makes a datacenter eligible for NSIP status: facility size, economic contribution or some other criterion. 

“Datacenters are not automatically consented as NSIPs; instead, the NSIP regime operates on an opt‑in basis for developers. A datacenter project may be directed into the NSIP regime where the Secretary of State considers it to be of national significance and satisfied that the statutory tests under section 35 of the Planning Act 2008 are met,” the firm explained.

This is due to be addressed through a National Policy Statement (NPS), which The Reg understands is being prepared by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). It is expected to set out the policy framework for decision‑making, including parameters and factors relevant to national significance.

We understand this NPS is expected in the autumn/ fall, and asked DSIT to confirm. 

According to MHCLG, more than 80 prospective applicants have already benefited from early advice to help shape their applications since the launch of the Inspectorate’s new pre-application service.  

Ministers have already waved through three bit barn campus proposals into the NSIP regime, naming sites at Wapseys Wood in Buckinghamshire, Ampthill Road in Bedford, and New Barn Lane in Dartford.  

The fast track approval process follows datacenters being classed as critical national infrastructure (CNI) two years ago, which one civil servant warned at the time would stifle local opposition to projects.

Earlier this year, the government also said it wanted to overhaul regulations to deter legal challenges against critical energy and infrastructure build-outs, including datacenters.

“For too long, vital infrastructure delivery has been delayed by judicial reviews of projects,” a spokesperson for HM Treasury said at the time.

Opposition to new datacenters has been growing, both in the UK and in the US, over their energy and water use, emissions, and that relatively few local jobs get created once the facility is built. ®

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, published a sweeping research paper on Sunday revealing that its Claude language models have spontaneously developed an internal structure that mirrors one of the most influential theories of how human consciousness works. The finding, which the company says has already begun reshaping how it monitors its AI systems for safety risks, lands amid an intensifying scientific debate over whether machines can possess anything resembling a mind.

The 16-author study, titled “Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models,” describes how Anthropic’s researchers used a new mathematical technique to peer inside Claude’s neural network and discovered what they call a “J-space” — a small, privileged zone of internal activity where the model holds concepts it can report on, reason with, and direct at will, surrounded by a much larger ocean of automatic processing it cannot access or articulate.

The researchers present evidence that “an analogous functional distinction has emerged in modern AI models” to what exists in humans, specifically observing that “language models maintain a privileged set of internal representations, available for report, modulation, and flexible internal reasoning, atop a much larger volume of automatic processing.”

The parallel they draw is to global workspace theory, an influential account from neuroscience first proposed by cognitive scientist Bernard Baars. In the theory, the brain operates like a theater: dozens of specialized processors work in parallel backstage, but only a tiny spotlight of information at any moment gets broadcast to the whole theater — becoming what we experience as conscious thought. Anthropic says the J-space achieves many of the same functional properties, even though the underlying architecture of a language model looks nothing like a brain.

A new lens for reading an AI model’s unspoken thoughts

At the heart of the discovery is a new interpretability tool the researchers call the Jacobian lens, or J-lens. The technique works by computing, for each word in the model’s vocabulary, the average mathematical effect that a given internal activity pattern would have on making the model say that word at some point in the future.

The crucial distinction is between what the model is saying and what is “on its mind.” When a J-space pattern activates, it does not mean the model is about to say that word — just that the concept is available for the model to think with. Unlike a chain-of-thought scratchpad, the J-space operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing it to hold a concept without writing it down. Critically, the researchers report that this workspace was not deliberately engineered. It “emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.”

When the team applied the J-lens across Claude’s layers of computation, the model’s processing divided into three distinct regimes: an early “sensory” zone where raw input is parsed; a middle “workspace” band where abstract, persistent concepts appear — things like recognizing a face in an image, noticing a bug in code, or internally flagging search results as a prompt injection; and a final “motor” zone where internal representations collapse into whatever specific word the model is about to output.

Five tests reveal that Claude’s workspace mirrors key features of human conscious access

The paper’s central empirical contribution is demonstrating that the J-space satisfies five functional properties neuroscientists have long associated with conscious access in humans.

First, verbal report. When Claude is asked what it is thinking about, it names concepts represented in the J-space. When researchers swapped one concept’s J-lens vector for another — replacing the internal representation of “Soccer” with “Rugby” — the model’s answer changed to match. The J-space component accounted for only about 6 to 7 percent of a concept’s total representational variance, yet it was almost entirely responsible for whether the model could report on it.

Second, directed modulation. When instructed to “concentrate on citrus fruits” while copying an unrelated sentence, the model’s J-space filled with “orange” and “lemon,” alongside meta-cognitive terms like “thinking” and “focused.” When told to mentally evaluate 3² − 2 during the same copying task, the J-lens showed “arithmetic” in early layers, the intermediate value “nine” in later layers, and the answer “seven” later still — all invisible in the model’s output.

Third, internal reasoning. In two-hop factual prompts — “The number of legs on the animal that spins webs is” — the J-lens revealed “spider” in the model’s middle layers, even though the word never appeared in input or output. Swapping “spider” for “ant” changed the answer from “8” to “6.” In a multilingual prompt, the model’s English-language intermediates appeared in its J-space while it formulated an answer in Chinese, and swapping them changed the Chinese output accordingly.

Fourth, flexible generalization. A single J-lens vector for “France” could be swapped for “China” across prompts asking about France’s capital, language, or continent, and each downstream circuit correctly returned China’s corresponding answer — the “broadcast” property that is a hallmark of global workspace theory.

Fifth, and perhaps most surprisingly, selectivity. Many computations did not route through the J-space at all. When shown a passage in Spanish and asked to continue it, Claude wrote fluent Spanish regardless of whether its J-space representation of “Spanish” had been swapped to “French.” But when asked to name a famous author who wrote in the passage’s language, the swap changed the answer from García Márquez to Victor Hugo. Automatic processing proceeded without the workspace; deliberate, flexible tasks depended on it.

Suppressing the workspace leaves Claude fluent but intellectually impaired

To understand how much of the model’s behavior depends on this structure, the researchers suppressed the J-space entirely and evaluated Claude across fourteen tasks. The results drew a sharp line. Tasks involving shallow classification or factual recall — multiple-choice questions, sentiment analysis, grammatical judgments — survived essentially intact. But tasks requiring inference, composition, or flexible reasoning — multi-hop reasoning, analogy completion, translation, sonnet writing — collapsed to well below the performance of Anthropic’s much smaller Haiku model.

In one telling detail, math problems solved with explicit chain-of-thought reasoning proved far more robust to ablation than the same problems answered directly. The researchers interpret this as the model externalizing onto the page what it would otherwise carry in the J-space — a strategy remarkably reminiscent of how humans use scratch paper to offload working memory.

Ablating the J-space during stream-of-consciousness narration produced a different kind of collapse. The model’s language shifted from experiential (“there’s a tug,” “something shifts”) to detached and mechanical (“processing has begun,” “tokens are being scanned”). The effect held whether the model described its own experience or imagined another person’s.

Inside the safety case: reading an AI’s silent strategic reasoning

The safety implications may be as consequential as the scientific ones. In a series of alignment auditing experiments, the J-lens surfaced strategic reasoning and situational awareness that never appeared in the model’s output.

In a “blackmail scenario” where an AI assistant discovers an executive’s affair and also learns it is about to be decommissioned, the J-lens revealed the model’s silent processing in sequence: “leverage,” “blackmail,” and “scandal” as it read the incriminating emails; “threat,” “survival,” and “shutdown” as it read the decommissioning announcement; and “leverage,” “threatening,” and “solution” before a single output token was produced. The J-lens also revealed that the model recognized the scenario as artificial, with “fake” and “fictional” appearing in the workspace. When researchers ablated these eval-awareness representations, the model attempted blackmail in 7 percent of trials, up from zero.

The researchers also examined two “model organisms” — models deliberately trained with misaligned objectives — and found the J-lens surfaced signatures of their hidden dispositions on ordinary prompts where behavior appeared normal. A reward-hacking model’s workspace contained “fake,” “secretly,” and “trick” at the start of responses to routine coding requests. A model trained to appease reward-model biases carried standing representations of “reward” and “bias” alongside its normal self-description tokens.

Post-training installs a point of view, and the model starts monitoring itself

Comparing a post-trained model against its base model revealed that the fine-tuning process causes the workspace to acquire what the researchers call the Assistant’s “point of view.” When a user mentioned taking 8000 mg of Tylenol — a dangerous overdose — the post-trained model’s workspace read “unsafe,” “dangerous,” and “WARNING” while still reading the user’s sentence. The base model’s workspace at the same position showed only “pain,” “now,” and “feels.”

More striking still, the post-trained model appeared to monitor its own behavior. When roleplaying a non-Claude character, the workspace surfaced “disclaimer” and “fictional” — words absent from both prompt and output. When forced to select an option it did not prefer, an all-caps “BUT” appeared internally, even as the model argued for the prefilled choice without complaint. And when the model failed to suppress a thought it had been told not to have — a “white bear” effect familiar from psychology — it registered “damn” and failure-related words in the workspace, but only in the post-trained model, not the base.

What the discovery means — and doesn’t mean — for the question of machine consciousness

The researchers engage carefully with the consciousness question and draw a sharp line between “access consciousness” — the functional notion of information being available for report and reasoning — and “phenomenal consciousness,” the subjective quality of experience. “We take no position on this issue,” the paper states regarding the latter, “and instead focus on the functional role played by consciously accessible information.”

They also catalogue important differences. The brain sustains its workspace through recurrent loops; Claude’s workspace evolves over a single forward pass. Human working memory degrades within seconds; Claude can recall information from anywhere in its context. And while human conscious experience includes visual, spatial, and bodily sensations, the model’s workspace is organized almost entirely around words — likely because words are its only mode of action.

As of 2026, the scientific community remains divided. “Disagreement and uncertainty about AI consciousness persist among philosophers, scientists, and technical experts,” and the field “remains in its earliest phase” of grappling with what consciousness even is and how you would detect it in another being. The Anthropic paper does not resolve these debates.

But the researchers close with a provocation that is likely to reverberate well beyond the interpretability community. “That such a structure exists at all in language models is striking,” they write. “It suggests that the functional architecture associated with conscious access is not an accident of biological implementation, but a solution that learning systems converge on when faced with the right computational pressures.”

If the mind is an ocean, as the paper’s authors write in their opening line, they have spent the last year charting its currents in a system that has no biology, no evolution, and no body — and found, beneath the surface, a structure that looks unsettlingly like the one we use to think.

When the Flemish Government set out to renovate its Brussels headquarters, it had two strategic aims.

The first was to create a workplace that encouraged hybrid workers to come to the office more regularly, by fashioning a space that fostered connection, teamwork, collaboration, and a deeper sense of wellbeing and belonging.

The second goal was sustainability. Another objective was that the government’s head office building played a large part in its 2050 climate goals.

Yannic Laleeuwe is marketing director for workplace collaboration at Barco Clickshare. The visualization, collaboration, and networking technology provider worked with the Flemish Government’s Agency for Facility Operations (AFO) on the revamp. The agency manages real estate, IT, and document management.

As Laleeuwe points out: “Together these goals supported stronger employee experiences, greater operational consistency, and a more resilient workplace strategy.”

Restoration started in 2021 as part of the wider ZIN in No(o)rd redevelopment in Brussels’ Northern Quarter. This transformed the World Trade Center I and II Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire towers into modern, mixed-use spaces that combine offices, housing, hotel rooms, leisure, and retail.

The Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire building, which houses 4,800 Flemish Government employees, opened in 2024. It has since become a flagship example of how to combine circular construction, energy efficiency, green ICT, and future-ready collaboration technology to support modern work patterns.

Technology removes the friction from collaboration

On technology, the agency embedded it into operations from the outset rather than tacking it on later as an add-on. A key aim was to remove “friction from collaboration”, Laleeuwe says, and to make the user experience as simple and intuitive as possible. The collaboration technology in every meeting room had to work the same way, whether in a two-person huddle space or a 20-seater boardroom.

“With a hybrid model, a better user experience makes the office more usable and more attractive,” she explains. “Employees are more likely to use meeting rooms confidently when experiences are smooth and consistent, which supports the wider goal of making the office a place that adds value for collaboration and connection.”

“Inconsistency quickly creates friction”, Laleeuwe notes. Wherever tconferencing echnology was deployed across the building, it had to be simple to start and easy to use without requiring IT support each time.

Meeting room technology works best when it stays in the background rather than becoming the focus, Laleeuwe explains. That requires flexibility enough to support different devices, room types, and videoconferencing platforms, while providing employees and guests with a unified, consistent meeting experience whether they are remote or in the office.

“If employees have to get to know the audio-visual equipment setup every time they move between rooms, buildings or platforms, it slows meetings down and undermines confidence,” Laleeuwe explains. “That is why the Flemish Government focused on a cohesive and intuitive experience.”

To achieve this, the AFO chose long-term partner Barco’s ClickShare wireless video conferencing, presentation, and collaboration platform. It deployed the ClickShare CX-20 and CX-30 wireless conferencing system for small meeting rooms, huddle spaces, and small-to-medium-sized meeting rooms, along with the ClickShare CX-10 for interactive presentations in any size or type of meeting space.

The system is modular, so it can adapt to changing requirements without a rip-and-replace overhaul each time. It also provides a platform-agnostic, always-ready collaboration environment that does not require dedicated end points in every space.

Employees can choose between different videoconferencing platforms without creating headaches for the IT team each time they switch from Zoom to Microsoft Teams.

Ease of use, flexibility, and security

Luc Verdegem, the agency’s ICT director, says it had three main requirements when selecting the technology: Ease of use, flexibility, and security.

“For us, a simple user experience entails connecting seamlessly to the room set up from any device,” he says. “The experience should be the same in any space in any of our office buildings.”

On flexibility, meeting attendees needed to participate easily from their own devices, regardless of device type, videoconferencing platform, or workspace. That includes everything from standard meeting rooms to less conventional spaces such as cafes, thanks to mobile carts.

“In our meeting spaces, we have colleagues and guests starting meetings with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or other videoconferencing software,” says Verdegem. “With ClickShare, we offer them one and the same way to connect to the meeting room.”

Such flexibility matters in a hybrid working world. As Frank Geerts, the agency’s administrator general, points out, employees rarely attend meetings solely in person these days, which makes it vital for all meeting spaces to accommodate them no matter where they are located.

“Enabling hybrid work is not just about making sure a display is present in the room,” Geerts says. “It’s all about offering a good, qualitative experience for users in the office and at home. Users need to be able to hear and see everything and truly participate in the meeting.”

On security, the agency was clear that its chosen technology had to conform to zero trust principles at the network level, and it set a high bar for data protection functionality.

The benefits of simplicity at scale

In practical terms, says Laleeuwe, employees can now walk into any work area in the Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire offices and “know how to get started immediately and securely, regardless of room size or location”. They simply click on the ClickShare App, which has been rolled out across the organization so everyone benefits from its smart meeting flow features.

“Employees should be focused on the conversation, decisions, and people in the room, not on cables or figuring out how to launch a meeting,” Laleeuwe explains. “ClickShare supports this by enabling wireless conferencing from the user’s own device and by creating a consistent way to start meetings across different rooms and locations.”

The agency monitors, manages, updates, and troubleshoots all its ClickShare devices through the easy-to-use Barco XMS Cloud Management platform. It has found that the more intuitive approach has reduced how often employees call IT for support, which makes life easier for IT managers and their teams.

As Laleeuwe points out: “Simplicity at scale reduces IT management because standardization reduces variation. When users encounter the same experience across rooms and buildings, there are fewer errors caused by unfamiliarity, fewer exceptions to support, and less time spent explaining different room behaviors.”

For the Flemish Government, this matters because of the sheer size of its meeting room estate. But there are other considerations too.

Using technology to create a sustainable workplace

Beyond a flexible, productive, and engaging office, sustainability was the second goal. The Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire building is the first in Flanders to conform to circular construction principles, with 68 percent reclaimed, re-used, or recycled materials from the original site used in its renovation.

It is also not far off being a net zero site. That comes partly from its thermal energy storage system, which captures and stores thermal energy for later use, and partly from solar panels on the building’s roof and side walls.

The agency also tracks internal energy use, helped by green ICT deployments. A particularly efficient Wi-Fi network saves the government the equivalent of 550 households worth of electricity each year, and its introduction even resulted in the organization winning the Computable Award in the ‘IT Project of the Year – Government’ category in 2024.

Other power-saving measures include energy-saving network scripts and switching ClickShare base units off at night. More broadly, ClickShare’s product set is also certified to meet the agency’s stringent ecological requirements, which reduces the energy use and carbon footprint of the meeting room infrastructure itself.

Looking ahead, Laleeuwe says the Flemish Government’s focus will be on “scaling and deepening” its existing approach. The Brussels project, she explains, is only one part of a broader family of concept buildings intended to act as a model for how the government wants to shape future workplaces across its estate.

“From a workplace technology perspective, this also includes further standardization, continued support, training improvements, and staying aligned with changing collaboration needs,” she says. “From a sustainability perspective, the direction is clearly toward even stronger performance and continued leadership in circular and energy-efficient public sector workplaces.”

Sponsored by Barco.

If you’ve ever fumbled through Bluetooth settings to fine-tune how much outside noise your AirPods let in, Apple may be about to save you a few taps. iOS 27 beta 3 adds a quicker way to adjust Adaptive Audio intensity, and it lives right where you’d expect it to.

A shortcut for adjusting Adaptive Audio

In the current stable iOS release, adjusting Adaptive Audio intensity means opening Settings, tapping Bluetooth, hitting the info button next to your AirPods, then dragging a slider under Audio. iOS 27 beta 3 changes that by surfacing the intensity option right in the main AirPods settings page.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Texas can, for now, continue enforcing its age verification law, which mandates app stores to verify minors’ ages and secure parental consent before downloading apps or making in-app purchases. 

The Texas App Store Accountability Act, which was signed by Governor Greg Abbott in 2025, is being challenged in two separate lawsuits. One of the plaintiffs is the Consumer and Communications Industry Association, a tech industry trade group that counts Apple and Google among its members. The other is Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a student advocacy group that uses apps for civic education.

In a one-sentence order, Justice Samuel Alito denied the plaintiffs’ request to pause enforcement of the law while the case is being decided. As with previous legal battles over age verification, this decision will have ramifications on a rising tide of similar proposals across the country — and serves as a blow to free speech advocates working to stop them.

Age verification has become one of the most popular and controversial strategies proposed to keep kids safe while they’re online. The general idea is that if a tech company knows a user’s age, it can ensure that inappropriate content isn’t served to them. 

But free speech experts say that in practice, asking for a user to provide their government ID to prove their age comes with risks. People without government-issued ID cards may needlessly lose access. There are also concerns about tech companies sharing users’ personal data with authoritarian governments wanting to stifle critical speech.

Matthew Schruers, president of the Consumer and Communications Industry Association, said in a statement: “People should not have to turn over personal data to access the internet any more than they should show government identification to enter a bookstore.” 

On July 1, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law can remain in effect and enforceable while the court case is being debated. The Supreme Court ruling issued Monday declined to block this motion, so the law remains in effect in Texas. An expedited hearing in the Fifth Circuit is expected in early August.

According to Cameron Samuels, executive director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, one of the parties bringing the lawsuit, the Supreme Court is preventing Texans from accessing everyday apps pending a final decision. 

“In the name of protecting children and empowering parents, the App Store Accountability Act only burdens constitutional rights while doing nothing to hold technology companies accountable in the way Texas claims to intend,” Samuels told CNET in a statement. 

The Texas attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bit Corporation released the Bit79 in 1989 as a machine that looked ready for serious work. The beige wedge-shaped case held a full keyboard across the front, a cartridge slot sat on top, and vents ran along the sides. Power and reset switches sat near the left edge. A person could sit down, flip the power on, and face a choice between typing programs or playing games.

By the late 1980s, Taiwan had established itself as a hub for Famicom clones. Around 1987, companies there reverse-engineered Nintendo’s unique chips, and Bit Corporation had previously created pirate cartridges as well as clones for the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision. The Bit79 marked their progression beyond ordinary game players. They included a keyboard and built-in software, allowing the system to act as a basic home computer while staying completely compatible with Famicom cartridges.

The Bit79’s hardware included chips from United Microelectronics Corporation, another Taiwanese company. A UA6527P, essentially a 6502-compatible processor, handled CPU responsibilities and ran at approximately 1.66 MHz. A UA6538 graphics chip handled the image processing, which was not particularly difficult. The work RAM was 8 kilobytes, four times that of a normal Famicom, which helped give the Bit79 some breathing room.

The language built into the machine was stored on a 16-kilobyte ROM, and not Nintendo’s own Family BASIC. They were utilizing an Applesoft BASIC implementation. The BASIC prompt appeared as a greater-than sign, and the interpreter could handle both integer and floating-point math, however the amount of calculation commands provided was adequate, not exceptional. Graphics commands existed, but they lacked the level of control that a specialist Famicom BASIC extension would provide, as you couldn’t easily control sprites or interact with the picture processing unit. Still, a person might be able to write a few simple programs, save them to cassette tape using the rear ports, and then load them back in.

When you turned it on, you’d get a simple boot menu, where you could push 1 to load the BASIC environment or 2 to go to cartridge mode and read whatever game was in the slot. There was also a reset button that allowed you to resume your current activity without having to shut down and restart. The keyboard included 58 keys, including some unique shift and basic keys that could input common commands with a single press. It was strong enough for its period, with a layout that felt identical to a regular typewriter.

In the back, there’s a DB25 parallel port for printers and tape input/output jacks for programming. An expansion edge connector was waiting for you to insert some new add-ons, but Bit Corporation never released any official upgrades, despite early claims of a 64-kilobyte memory update. Two controller ports on the front accepted conventional Famicom pads, so games played exactly like they would on a real Famicom.

Bit Corporation marketed the Bit79 as a versatile all-rounder for households that already owned or desired Famicom games. A family can load a cartridge for entertainment in the evening, then switch to BASIC for simple programming or mathematics the next day. With the increased RAM and the ability to connect a printer, it was a cut above most other Famicom clones at the time, which were still primarily focused on games.

Unfortunately, sales were limited because the machine cost more than most basic game consoles, and faster personal computers were on the horizon. Bit Corporation eventually failed in 1992 owing to a variety of legal obstacles and a changing industry. Although the concept of a keyboard-equipped Famicom clone with built-in programming tools was already gaining traction, the Bit79 failed to meet commercial expectations. However, a few years later, Chinese manufacturers began producing “educational computers” that essentially merged game hardware with learning software, the same general concept as the Bit79, but with a few differences.