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A commentary on Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science by Clark, A. (in press). Behav. Brain Sci. The Active Inference framework (Friston et al., 2009; Friston, 2010) argues that the brain’s generative models continuously produce predictions and goals that guide its action (active inference) and perception (predictive coding) through free energy minimization. In this framework, most studies have focused on the on-line predic-tion of perceptual events and the control of overt behavior.We propose that the frame-work can be extended to explain cognitive control. We assume that architectures of cogni-tive control are elaborations of the predic-tive architectures of sensorimotor behav-ior in early living organisms. As the senso-rimotor control system of early organisms evolved (to face increasingly harder indi-vidual and social problems), it gradually began predicting increasingly long-term and abstract consequence of behavior and—critically—doing so off-line and without overt behavior. This permitted rehearsing action sequences without exe-cuting them. In turn, off-line predictions opened the doors to higher cognitive abili-ties, such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledg