Anthropic on Thursday announced a new interface that will make it simpler for AI agents to operate and communicate with machinery, as the artificial intelligence giant pushes into the physical world.
The Model Hardware Standard, or MHS, is designed to work with any device that has a programmable interface, including those used in scientific research and advanced manufacturing, Anthropic said. Users can think about it like a USB-C cord, which standardizes how information is transmitted between devices.
"We built this for science to sort of show the promise of AI, but there's also huge benefits here for enterprise and for industry," Elizabeth Kelly, head of beneficial deployments at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview.
The announcement signals that Anthropic is wading deeper into hardware, where rivals including OpenAI and Amazon have spent billions of dollars designing AI-native devices and manufacturing tools. Anthropic is building out a silicon team to design custom chips for its models and recently hired Caitlin Kalinowski, a hardware executive who previously worked at OpenAI, Meta and Apple, according to LinkedIn.
Anthropic said MHS aims to help companies reduce the amount of time it takes to set up and integrate their hardware. It's also model agnostic, which means users are not beholden to Anthropic's family of Claude models.
MHS is initially available to a select group of organizations in science, robotics and manufacturing as part of a research preview, Anthropic said. But the company eventually plans to open-source the standard, which means any device manufacturer in any industry will be able to adopt it.
Anthropic open-sourced another popular standard called the Model Context Protocol in 2024, which makes it easier to connect AI agents and data sources.
WATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
