Anthropic: Claude designs quantum circuits beating published ones by up to 10x
eyishazyer · x · 2026-10-17
Anthropic's STEM Fellows Program had Claude design quantum circuits from plain-language specs, scored by an automated evaluator.
- Across 8 circuits spanning chemistry, optimization, physics simulation, and number theory, Claude largely worked on its own and found designs improving on the best published ones — in some cases by an order of magnitude or more.
- Such gains substantially cut the quantum resources needed for useful applications, suggesting practical quantum computers could arrive sooner than anticipated.
- Led by Andi Gu, mentored by Anthropic quantum physicist Alek Kemeny, in collaboration with Susanne Yelin and Mikhail Lukin (Harvard/QuEra); paper on arXiv.
- Context: today's machines have only hundreds to thousands of noisy qubits, so circuit efficiency directly determines what's runnable.
A landmark case of frontier models doing verifiable scientific research.
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