Anthropic makes first move into physical AI with new way for scientists, manufacturers to bring equipment to life

Imagine a factory where all the equipment is powered by AI, where robotic arms and assembly lines can “communicate” with their own shared language.

Or picture a science lab, where microscopes can autonomously search for a certain type of molecule—all hours of the day, no humans necessary.

That’s the idea behind Anthropic new Model Hardware Standard (MHS), which the company released as a research preview on Thursday.

MHS, which marks Anthropic’s first foray into so-called physical AI, is essentially a framework for connecting advanced large language models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Claude with physical objects, from manufacturing equipment to microscopes.

With MHS, companies can integrate AI into their equipment in “hours or minutes,” Anthropic said.

Typically, this process would take “weeks, if not months,” and require specialists to do a custom build.

Expanded access to advanced AI tools will pave the way for “autonomous, round-the-clock experiments and workflows,” the company said.

Scientific research and advanced manufacturing applications are among the primary uses.

The MHS can also help connect multiple devices to one another, enabling them to communicate through a set of commands, such as “read.” Any hardware device can understand these commands and act on them.

MHS is model-agnostic, meaning it works with any LLM—not just Claude—including models built by other companies such as OpenAI or open-source models.

It’s built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a universal, open standard for connecting data sources that Anthropic debuted in 2024.

The MCP is “kind of like the USB for AI to software connection,” Alek Kemeny, a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, tells Fortune .

Not all existing equipment can connect to MHS out of the box, as not all have a programming interface, Kemeny said.

As part of this project, Anthropic is working with a lot of device manufacturers” to build new products with the necessary interface, and are pre-loaded with the MHS.