Anthropic Previews Standard for AI Control of Physical Devices

Anthropic is opening a research preview of a shared specification for artificial intelligence agents to operate physical devices, specifically lab and manufacturing instruments, the company said in a Thursday (Aug. 27) announcement.

The Model Hardware Standard (MHS) enables agents to operate instruments such as microscopes, liquid handlers and robotic arms; perform tasks ranging from routine drug discovery to laser calibration on a quantum computer; operate around the clock; and, in some cases, recover from hardware errors without human intervention, according to the announcement.

Anthropic is making MHS available to a first group of partners in the science, robotics, electronics and manufacturing sectors. After collaborating with these partners to build safety evaluations and develop best practices for AI systems that operate physical equipment, Anthropic plans to make the standard open source, per the announcement.

“As we developed MHS, we shared it with a handful of labs and hardware manufacturers in biotech, robotics, quantum computing and other fields,” Anthropic said in the announcement. “Across these early projects, we saw MHS reduce the time it took to integrate devices, make it possible to iterate faster in a variety of experimental settings, and assist with the live operation of machines and real-time fault detection.”

PYMNTS reported in November that physical AI is emerging as the next stage of robotics as advances in sensing, perception and large AI models give machines capabilities that traditional automation never supported. For example, simulation, digital twins and multimodal learning pipelines enable robots to learn adaptive behaviors and carry those behaviors into real facilities with minimal retraining.

In March, PYMNTS reported that physical AI and vertical AI startups were drawing investor attention as venture funding flowed toward companies building systems designed to either operate in the physical world or automate specialized industry workflows.

In another Thursday announcement, Anthropic said it is expanding its support for scientists by opening 10,000 seats for scientists around the world to access Claude subscriptions for free and at discounted rates and by expanding its AI for Science program beyond biological sciences and into other scientific fields.

“By helping scientists access and increase their usage of Claude through subscriptions, credits and products like Claude Science, we aim to radically accelerate scientific discovery,” Anthropic said in the announcement.