San francisco: Anthropic has opened a research preview of a system that allows artificial intelligence (AI) assistants such as Claude to control scientific and engineering equipment and conduct experiments, marking the company's first tool designed to operate in the physical world.
According to Emirates News Agency, the technology, called the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), enables AI agents to autonomously operate a wide range of devices that can be programmed using computer code. These include complex microscopes, liquid handlers, lasers, and robotic arms.
The research preview will initially be available to a first group of scientific research labs and advanced manufacturers, Anthropic said, as the Claude chatbot maker seeks to expand its enterprise business and boost revenues with new applications.
Anthropic claims AI agents can reason through individual steps in an experiment, change parameters in real-time, and, in some cases, recover from hardware errors without intervention. This could allow researchers and engineers to run autonomous experiments and workflows around the clock.
The company has also stated that Claude can interact with hardware in an exploratory manner, similar to how a scientist might approach an unfamiliar experiment. Scientists have observed AI agents tracking, adjusting, and repeating experiments in ways similar to human researchers. In one neuroscience experiment, an Anthropic scientist observed Claude examine live brain tissue and identify the alveus, a specific part of the brain.
Anthropic plans to open-source MHS, but will first work on safeguards to reduce the risk of errors when AI agents interact with physical equipment. This launch follows Anthropic's introduction in June of Claude Science, its first product dedicated to scientists, which includes applications such as rendering three-dimensional protein structures and assisting with drug discovery. MHS takes that effort further by allowing AI agents to move from analyzing scientific information and generating hypotheses to interacting with the physical equipment used to test them.
