Anthropic are kicking off the first phase of their research preview for Model Hardware Standard (MHS):

Anthropic are kicking off the first phase of their research preview for Model Hardware Standard (MHS): a new standard for AI agents to safely operate physical equipment in scientific research and advanced manufacturing. Previewing the Model Hardware Standard For the past year, we've been putting AI to work inside labs and manufacturing facilities. We kept hitting the same wall. There's no common way to connect a model to physical equipment. The Model Hardware Standard changes that. MHS gives any AI model one standard way to connect with and operate devices. Before MHS Camera Microscope Incubator Control PC Sensor Array Vacuum Pump Spectrometer Incubator Laser Physics Robot After MHS Agent MHS Camera Microscope Robot Arm Centrifuge Vacuum Pump Spectrometer Incubator Laser Physics Robot Sensor Array Thermal Camera AI Each device connects once through one interface. The setup is accelerated by the agent. Any device that speaks MHS can talk to anything else. Devices communicate at B-metal speed. The agent has access to this context and can control operations. Here we're seeing Claude controlling a microscope on its own. It's focusing the microscope, looking for a bacteria and deciding what to capture next. At Genentech, a scientist designed an experiment in a PDF, dropped that PDF into Claude, then Claude autonomously executed that experiment. When things went wrong, it was able to recover even overnight. The iteration cycle is much faster and the focus for me as a scientist shifts to actual scientific questions. Once everything is connected, running an experiment looks like you can ask Claude to start it. Here we're looking at images of neurons in the brain. With MHS, I can instruct the microscope to move around, go deeper, or even take side views, all in real time. If you can test hypotheses faster, you could create general technology faster, or solving important scientific problems. This is how a century of progress can compress into a decade. ANTHROPIC hhmi janelia Research Campus